


Scatter God and Gold

by Tayine



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Crusades Era Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, First Time, Historical Accuracy, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Origin Story, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sex Work, Slow Burn, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:20:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 41,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26119444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tayine/pseuds/Tayine
Summary: A Genovese fleet appears in the port city of Jaffa, just outside Jerusalem, bringing reinforcements to the siege around the city. Soon after, the city falls. Two men meet and kill each other. This is the story of how they fall in love.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 115
Kudos: 461





	1. Days Zero and One

rūḥī fidāʾu ʿidhārin ḥalla wajnata man fāqa l-kawākiba shamsan thumma aqmārā

law-lā l-ʿidhāru la-mā sṭāʿat lanā muqalun ilā muḥayyāhu bāhī l-ḥusni ibṣārā

ka-sh-shamsi lam tuṭiqi l-abṣāru ruʾyatahā law-lā saḥābun laṭīfun ḥawlahā dārā

I would give everything for the sprouting beard that settled on the cheeks of one who – being a sun – is superior to stars and even moons.

If it weren’t for his beard, our eyes could not look into his face with its radiant beauty,

Just like the sun, which our glances could not bear if fine clouds did not surround it.

\- 'Abdallaṭīf Fatḥallāh

☽

The ocean lapped pleasantly beneath the dock, calm in a way that it had not been only days before, during the midnight storm that had threatened to seize and drown every life in every boat that sailed in the fleet. But it was morning now, the sun risen and shining pink and blue in the eastern sky. It had been a fair summer in Genova, and the weather seemed to be shared here, across the Mediterranean in a new kingdom, climate, world.

Nicolò di Genova stepped down onto the dock, shading his eyes with one hand. He was glad to be back on solid ground after weeks of ship life. Behind and around him, fellow sailors and soldiers were unloading their wares and boxes and mounts, bringing the horses down long ramps and muttering soothing words as their eyes rolled in their sockets. Too close to the nearest horse and handler, he skirted the flailing of the beast’s head as it shed its sea legs on the uneven dock. He went to the end of the pier and then stepped down, into the brown, muddy sand of the shore. He went to one knee, burying his fingers in the cool sand and letting the very last vestiges of each wave lap against them, the foam building up around his knuckles.

“Nicolò!”

He looked to the caller and jogged to the man’s side. Baldassare Lazzeri, his patron and a family friend to many of the _padri della città_ of their city-state, had taken him and a few other of the young noblemen’s sons under his wing, favoring them with attention, instruction, and guidance. Nicolò had seen some of the lesser soldiers throwing snide glances their way. It had boiled in him at first, until he’d noticed that Baldassare himself didn’t deign to even acknowledge the jealousy. Since then, he had kept his chin high, turning his face away when the others mouthed insults at his back, Baldassare’s hand clamped on his shoulder.

“Take a horse and ride ahead to the siege field. Tell them we are coming. Make sure they know of our strength.” Baldassare raised his hand to summon the freshest, most adapted horse, his other hand placed, as it always was when Nicolò stood close enough, on his shoulder, pulling him close like a father.

“Yes, sir,” he said, glad for the duty. It meant he wouldn’t have to help with the rest of the unloading or the organizing of the baggage train.

“We will be half a day behind you,” his patron said, looking serious as he supervised the work. Their fleet hadn’t wasted any time in the sail from Genova and wouldn’t waste any time here. The last they had heard, the forces which lay in siege around Jerusalem needed as much help as they could get.

“I’ll be quick,” Nicolò promised.

“I know,” Baldassare smiled, the crinkles around his eyes deepening. “Godspeed.”

The younger man bowed his head and mounted the horse that had been brought to them, already tacked and seemingly anxious to run the seasickness from its legs. He reined the beast around, testing its mouth, then kicked it forward to clatter onto the streets of Jaffa.

The port city was newly captured, and activity around was bustling, especially closest to the ports where Christian ships had already begun their trade. Nicolò had to steer his anxious mount past several clattering carts, clicking his tongue and muttering encouragement. Shoppers and laborers moved out of his way better than the carts, at least, hauling cloth and fruit and stone. He was a skilled horseman, having been taught to ride almost as soon as he’d been taught to walk, and he quickly developed a rapport with the mount, a flashing chestnut stallion with keen ears that swiveled back to listen to his murmurs beneath the clattering of its hooves.

He didn’t know the way, exactly, but from the maps he’d seen, he knew Jerusalem was due south-east. He just had to ride into the morning sun.

☉

There was a special sickness to the air as Yusuf al-Kaysani paced through the marketplace. From this position in the open-air space, among the tents and stalls and tables, he could see the city walls with the chest-high balustrade. The parapets were lined with armed men, crossbowmen and spearmen and men to arm and guide the mangonels. A few young boys had joined them, piling rocks at their feet, and stood solemn watch beside their elder brothers.

The siege outside the city had swelled three weeks before, reinforced by scores of men, horses, and equipment. The city fathers had watched with anxiety as siege towers and ladders and a deadly-looking battering ram had risen from what before had been only timber and iron. The reinforcements had brought the supplies with them and had built the structures up faster than was thought possible, as if they had worked by moonlight as well. Three weeks ago, the siege had been a few dirty Franks sitting guilelessly around their campfires, burning what little brush and wood they could find. Now, there was a proper army just outside the city walls, and they burned with desire.

Yusuf wrung his hands together. The marketplace was nigh abandoned; no one was conducting trade with an assault seemingly so close at hand. The city itself had been prosperous and vibrant only weeks before, when he’d first arrived with his cart and his donkeys and his assistant. He had visited Jerusalem once as a child, and he’d always longed to return. Now it felt like a fool’s wish come true, the trick of a jinn looking to satisfy its need for treachery. Yusuf and his young merchant apprentice, Ammar, had been trapped within the city walls, unable to leave past the invading force just outside. They had been waiting with bated breath for weeks, wondering if the invaders would triumph. Wondering how much the city itself could take.

Jerusalem was clogged with refugees, women and children packed inside the walls and the rented rooms, fleeing smaller villages and homesteads away from the force that had destroyed as it advanced across their lands. Yusuf wondered how they were going to fare if the invaders made it inside. How many women would be raped, how many children would be enslaved? He didn’t count on the Franks being sympathetic gaolers.

There was a great rush of sound, sudden and trampling, that made Yusuf jerk, looking around. It was distant, but it was rising, approaching. Voices, and stomping feet and hooves, and the clatter of shields and swords raised for action.

“No,” he whispered. It had begun.

The men on the upper walks of the city walls were shaking out the weariness from their limbs, huffing on short breaths and bouncing on the balls of their feet. They were aiming their crossbows and the wicked arms of the mangonels. The commanding officers were shouting orders, encouragement, calls for bravery and honor.

Yusuf bolted down the streets, rushing past other refugees dressed in rags and silhouetted in doorways, calling anxiously out at strangers for an explanation, a reassurance. The city was suddenly alive, where before it had seemed almost in hibernation, the collective breath of the souls inside exhaling in one gasping cry. This was it, this was it. Now there would be only fighting, or death.

☽

The sword in Nicolò’s hand weighed heavier now that it was blood-soaked. He had been in the middle of the pack that scaled the breached walls, not the first nor the last. The Saracens he had faced were no longer fresh for the fight but were not yet spoiled from injury, making it the best place for his swordplay. His mail rattled over his undershirt as he ran, clashing sword with scimitar or spear, triumphing each time.

The city itself was magnificent, more vast and structured than he’d been expecting. Their walls were made of dirt and stone like he’d been told in the scoffing remarks from older veterans, yes, but the buildings were architecturally stunning, splashed with color and texture and ornament. Nicolò had followed his brethren through the streets, but he frequently found himself looking up instead of down at the combatants who rushed them. There was clay and marble, too, and frescoes and mosaics. He wished there was time for him to make better note of it, to take impressions back to Genova. Perhaps he could commission a mural from memory, finding an artist that could do it justice.

Much of the architecture was obscured by smoke now, though, especially as the second day of fighting dragged on. The heat of summer was rising, combining thickly with the smoke of the fires that were being started across the city. He coughed into his sleeve more than once, the chainmail dragging along his chapped lips. He was tiring of the sport. The city was surely won by now.

“All good, Nico?” called a voice, and he threw a tired gesture back at the soldier who had called, a friendly lad named Vittorio, the son of a fisherman back home. “Given up now?”

“Merely resting,” he replied. Indeed, there was a certain lull in the fighting around them, as their forces had spread through the streets like a wildfire through trees, driving the rabbits and deer out of their hiding places into plain sight.

“Can’t let them catch their breath, you know,” Vittorio grinned. He smoothed the baby-blond hair from his forehead, handsome and shining with his victories. He had a splash of blood along one cheek that was not his.

“We don’t need to kill if they surrender,” Nicolò reminded him. “They see our strength.”

“We don’t need thirty thousand prisoners.” Vittorio grabbed at Nicolò’s forearm, tugging him further down the narrow street. “I heard more this way.”

Nicolò sighed and let himself be led, his sword hand aching until he flexed his fingers. They stepped into the door of a residence, lined with rugs and tapestries, bowls and chairs overturned.

“This is someone’s home, Vittorio,” he said quickly. “There are no soldiers here.”

“We’re not looking for soldiers.”

“Who are we—”

The blond Genovese pushed past a curtain into a back room, yelling triumphantly for his compatriot. When Nicolò came through as well, he saw several huddled forms in one corner, draped in folds of linen and cloth, owl-eyes watching them in fear.

“It’s all right,” he said, holding out the hand that was not clutching the bloodied sword. “Vittorio—”

To his right, his friend was scooping up an armful of rich silk. “Do you know what this could fetch us back home?” the blond soldier grinned.

“We are not looting!” Nicolò snapped immediately.

“Everyone is looting, you stump. That’s why I came over to this street.”

“Vittorio—”

“Don’t be a jerk, Nicolò, or everyone will think you’re a sympathizer.” Vittorio shouldered past him back the way they had come, his arms burdened with a load of fabrics. “Everyone already thinks you’re soft.”

“They do not,” Nicolò retorted, following.

“Do so. Educated, cultured, noble-lived _figlio di Genova_. The blood on you will help some, though.” Vittorio threw a chin back at him, his eyebrows up in appreciation at the stains on his sword and the front of his tunic.

“Vittorio—!”

The warning call was drowned by a high-pitched battle cry. Vittorio, who had been looking back, did not see the small figure in the doorway to the residence, rushing at him with a dagger. Nicolò lunged forward to catch the youth’s arm, but the dagger went across the chainmail covering his skin, rattling and sharp. Vittorio dropped the bundle and drew his sword.

“No!” Nicolò screamed, but the blow dropped the lad like he’d been turned to a doll, limp and patchwork. Vittorio had to tug his sword free with a violent pull, snaring on bone and tendon.

“He attacked me first!” Vittorio said shrilly, but there was a wound behind his eyes as he stared at the little body.

“You didn’t have to kill him!”

“There you go, being soft again—!”

Another figure rushed into the room. This one was taller than either of them, his immediate grief and rage swelling, consuming outwards. He had heard the commotion, had possibly been chasing the boy. He held a scimitar, the wicked curved blade unblemished, unlike Nicolò’s. He was bearded and lean and clothed in fabric that was pretty like a girl’s. The owner of the silks.

Vittorio, thrilled by the adrenaline and half-mad with his own grief, went forward with his longsword, driving the step in a two-handed downswing that must have rattled the Saracen as he lifted his scimitar to block, their swords clashing and held aloft.

Nicolò went forward too, numb with regret. He slipped in the youth’s blood as he went, but he regained his footing in time to block the Saracen’s answering thrust at him. The enemy was strong, but there were two of them against him, and Nicolò could see the fear in his expression as his gaze went back and forth between them, balancing their skills against his, calculating which to attack first and faster.

Vittorio took advantage, a skilled swordsman and now in the throes of defending his honor. It had not been a noble kill against the youth, but this would be, and perhaps the stain would be washed away with this man’s blood. He bellowed a Zeneize curse and hacked sideways, nicking the man’s side and making him flinch. In triumph, Vittorio raised his sword over his head, a two-handed executioner’s blow.

The Saracen produced a dagger in his off hand, smearing its flashing, silver-blue blade beneath the hem of the chainmail covering Vittorio’s torso. The thin fabric of his leggings was cut like butter, and an answering flush of blood came as Vittorio lost the tension in his sliced leg. He staggered sideways, unable to keep himself up, only just keeping hold of his sword in one hand with the other going out in vain defense. The Saracen pushed his scimitar through the man’s outstretched hand and pinned it to his upper thigh, and Vittorio screamed, screamed, fell.

Nicolò lurched forward, unbalanced by the violence but knowing it was him or the other, now. His longsword was heavy and had the better reach, so he used its power against the scimitar’s speed. He swung it out, forced it in a follow-through against the block the Saracen attempted as he pulled the scimitar from Vittorio’s body, and felt the soft resistance of flesh. He pushed harder, bringing his body close to the Saracen’s, their eyes beholding the other. Nicolò had killed many men before this, but he’d never been so close, and he’d never looked into their eyes as he did it.

A bite against the skin of his throat. He choked, gargled, and released the sword that was embedded in the Saracen’s gut. Both hands went to his neck, holding it, but the blood spurted between his fingers. His head rushed, and he went down to one knee, breathing blood instead of air.

The Saracen pulled Nicolò’s sword out from himself with an animal roar and then held the hole it had left, with both hands, the way Nicolò was doing. He went down to both knees, then sat back onto his heels. They were together in life for a moment, watching the other die. Nicolò went first, keeling forward onto his face, as his vision greyed out and his fingers relaxed. He took in a breath, hot and tasting of iron—

☉

Yusuf gasped and then bellowed. Hands were touching his face, his chest.

“He’s alive!” screeched a feminine voice, and then several more chattered over him.

“Let go! Get off me!”

“You’re hurt, my lord, don’t move.”

“Stop at once!” He reached first for his sword where it had dropped, smelling the blood on himself. The other bodies, Ammar and the two Franks, were still there, as unmoving as he’d left them. He rolled onto his knees and crawled for Ammar, his little body tacky with the pool of blood he’d left behind. His eyes were half-mast, his mouth hanging open, as surely a corpse as he himself had been, only moments before. He remembered dying. He remembered the swirl of blood-loss behind his eyes, as every muscle in his body gave way, falling backwards and not feeling his head hit the ground.

But he was alive now. He put his free hand to his chest and found the frantic pounding of his heart.

“My lord!” cried another of the women, pointing.

The ashy-haired Frank was moving.

“Run from here! Go, now!” Yusuf got to his feet and swept the women out the door with one arm, feeling pangs in his belly as he moved. Maybe he hadn’t died, only passed out, and it would be coming for him soon. Well, if that was the case, then he was determined to take both invading pigs out with him.

The Frank pushed up, disoriented. He didn’t have the advantage of awakening to friendly voices and hands. The women had been in the opening ritual of preparing his body for death, a noble gesture against the countless deaths outside their building. He hoped they could find another safe place to hide.

“I’ll cut you again and again, if that’s what it takes,” Yusuf said to the Frank, standing strong now, over the enemy on his hands and knees at his feet.

The Frank looked up. One hand went to his neck. His fingers were stained with his blood, but as the touch came away, Yusuf saw what the Frank was feeling for: the cut across his neck was gone.

“Wraith,” Yusuf whispered in horror. He brought the scimitar down.

The Frank rolled in an acrobatic move, reaching for his longsword, but Yusuf struck again, missing by a hair’s breadth as the Frank snatched his hand back. Then the enemy barreled at him, wrapping his arms around Yusuf’s thighs. Yusuf gored his elbow into the long stretch where neck met shoulder, trying to bring pain that would unlock the grip the stronger man had on him, but he tipped backwards as his center of gravity was tilted. His head struck the hard floor last, but it still hurt, and he blinked away the stars that burst in his vision.

The Frank broke his grip on the sword in his hand so that it clattered away, and now Yusuf was really mad. He roared, kicking up, driving a fisted punch against the other man’s jaw. When the Frank jolted backwards, Yusuf followed, bringing his legs beneath him in a momentary crouch before pouncing forward, feeling like a cat going after a stunned mouse.

He wrapped his hands around the man’s throat, pushing him onto his back, sitting on his hips. He squeezed, panting, feeling the rush of blood in his own head. The Frank spluttered, his eyes shut and wet mouth open and gasping. His hands clawed onto Yusuf’s wrists, but nothing would stop him now.

He’d never strangled anyone before. He’d never killed anyone, not before the golden-haired Frank, who thankfully still lay as dead as he deserved. But he wasn’t expecting the time it took for the frantic fluttering of the Frank’s eyes and mouth, the bucking of his torso as he fought, to stop. He was a wildcat himself, Yusuf could give him that. It took long, painful moments before Yusuf felt the pulse in his neck fall away. The tension in the tendons of his throat relaxed. His hands fell, fingernails full of the skin that he had scratched off of Yusuf’s arms.

Panting, Yusuf shoved away from the other man, whose head lolled from the motion. He stood, tottering, and remembered the skewering of his stomach. This fight had surely reopened the wound.

But when he put his hand to the hole in his tunic, he too found nothing there. Panicking slightly, he pulled at the rip, elongating it, exploring the smooth, warm skin of his belly. He knew he’d been driven through by the Christian sword – hadn’t he? Maybe it was a trick. Maybe he’d dreamed it, or it had happened a different way and his mind was changing the story.

There was no explaining the blood, however. Yusuf’s shirtfront was drenched in it, all the way down to his trousers. Something had caused the rip in the fabric and the blood to gush from him.

A problem for later. Right now, he was whole enough to tend to Ammar, who had deserved death less than any of the rest of them. He bent and picked up the boy’s body, cradling him. Eleven years old—no, twelve, he’d just turned twelve. Apprenticed to Yusuf for nearly four years, he’d followed his master from city to city, tending the donkeys, minding the cart, and bartering out the silks and other fine linens and cloths they traded in. He’d been a good lad, sweet-tempered and quicker to laugh than anyone else Yusuf had ever known. He’d been on the cusp of manhood, and he’d bought the dagger himself, the one time he dug in his heels and was as obstinate as their asses. For protection, he’d said. For if I ever need to save you, Master.

Yusuf choked on a sob. The boy’s hair had fallen back from his face, already greying from death. He brought him into the back room and lay him down on the rug. The damned Franks had grabbed most of their wares, shoved back here while the city burned in case they could find a way to sneak out, but there was enough silk for a shroud. Yusuf unrolled it beside Ammar and stripped the boy’s shirt from him. His hands began to shake. He paused, breathing sharply through his nose, and let his head hang.

A footstep behind him. Yusuf tried to stand, but he was rocked from behind, a body shoving into his and flattening him over Ammar.

“Not the boy!” Yusuf cried before he could help himself. “Please!” He recoiled from Ammar’s body, but the Frank had locked his arms around Yusuf’s throat, pressing him down.

Yusuf choked, scrabbling his hands on the chainmail armor. His fingernails frayed and broke on the metal, so he went higher, reaching back for the Frank’s hair. He pulled, trying to rip from the roots, and reached his other hand further, clawing at anything soft.

The Frank snarled something into his ear and pulled him up, dragging him into standing. Then he produced the dagger Ammar had bought and brandished. They had been rushing back to the house together; the women holed here had lost the protection of their men, when the two brothers Yusuf had befriended had died at his side, one after another. Yusuf had shouted for Ammar, and they had run together, aiming to hole up here and kill anyone who stepped through the door. But the youth was fast, springy like a gazelle, and he’d been several long strides ahead. Yusuf had shouted for him to slow down and wait, but he hadn’t listened, and he’d heard the keening cry of the prepubescent voice coming from inside the house only moments before he’d been able to catch up. When he’d stepped inside, he’d read the tragedy in flashes, instantaneous and heart-rending.

The Frank drove the dagger, Ammar’s dagger, into Yusuf’s chest, and he screamed at the pain. He struggled, but each movement snared the knife’s edge on his flesh even more, and he pressed backwards into the man’s chest, as if to escape the blade. He coughed, and blood bubbled up into his throat, coming out of his mouth like phlegm. His struggles lessened.

He knew what dying felt like, or at least he believed he did, from the gut wound, and he sank down into the Frank’s supporting grip. The invader let him drop and kicked him over onto his back, standing over him. There was coldness in his expression.

Yusuf slid his gaze to Ammar’s body instead, letting it be the last thing he saw. He choked and drowned, taking in one last breath, then another, then—

☽

The city was theirs. It had been, possibly, from the moment they’d breached the walls, but as the sun set and deepened into twilight, it was now certain. Nicolò staggered, bracing himself up with one arm against a building. He didn’t see the beautiful façades anymore. He saw only death, and ruin, and the face of the Saracen boy, and that of the man.

He’d carried Vittorio’s body back to camp, undisturbed except by one stuffed-shirt officer who screamed after him from horseback with a Norman accent. Nicolò didn’t understand, so he didn’t acknowledge, shuffling under the weight of his friend’s body knifed over his shoulder.

The wounds in his throat, the cut and the strangulation, were no more, but he could still feel them. He remembered, vividly and with flushing shame and fear, how it had felt to die. Twice. But there were no wounds on him there or anywhere else, so the blood was explained away as not belonging to him. His fellow soldiers clapped him over the shoulder, told him good job, have another.

Nicolò had almost stabbed the first man who said it, jovial and flashing yellowing teeth. He’d restrained himself, hoisted Vittorio’s body on his shoulder, and walked back to camp without a word, ignoring the insulted shout directed at his back.

But he’d been forced to return to the killing field, to kill there. Baldassare would be watching him, astride the same chestnut Nicolò had ridden three weeks ago to deliver the news of the fleet of Genova, here at last. Nicolò had tried to make an excuse, asking for a momentary vigil over Vittorio’s body. He’d say a prayer, and then another, but his true intent was to see if his friend would wake from death, as he had. Surely, if Nicolò had been given this second and third chance, Vittorio would too.

Even in the long minutes it had taken him to walk the body back to the camp, however, he’d known it wouldn’t be so. He had returned within moments, both times, and the Saracen too, matching Nicolò death for death, at least until the true end. Nicolò had stood over the Saracen’s body for what felt like an eternity, waiting for a twitch, a gasp. None had come. He’d nudged the body with his boot. When he’d been satisfied, he’d retrieved Vittorio and left that wretched place. He couldn’t even look at the silks without feeling the tug of nausea at the back of his throat.

As the sun had traveled, and more of the city burned, and more of its people fell, Nicolò had stopped to vomit twice, expelling the contents of his stomach until there’d been nothing but burning bile to spit. Baldassare had found him that second time, holding his hands against a wall as his stomach contracted with retches.

“It’s the stink of blood, isn’t it?” his patron had asked, sage and quiet. He’d reined the spirited stallion around and leaned down, reaching to pat one of Nicolò’s shoulder blades. “You’d think the smoke would smother it.”

“It’s not the blood,” Nicolò said, spitting. Though it was.

“Stand up, son. Find a well, wash your mouth. Keep going. It’s the only way.”

If Nicolò tried to say that he was done killing, he’d be executed. He was following holy orders, consigned to this work under the authority of God. But nothing about this felt holy.

“Done?” Baldassare asked, when the last spit produced little except air.

“Yes.”

“Good. Keep going.”

Women and children. Nicolò had kept going since then, and he’d seen women and children, and old men, and cats and dogs and goats. Anything moving that was not Christian. He hadn’t killed a single thing since the Saracen in the back room of the home, but his fellows had, and the streets were inflamed with blood.

“Stop!” he’d shouted at one, a Frank with a brutish jaw. The man had been raising a club to a cowering boy, barely ten. Nicolò had stepped between them and shoved, and the man had responded in kind, swinging the club without hesitation against his face. Nicolò had staggered, his cheek exploding in pain, and he’d landed on his knees. His jaw was broken and wouldn’t cooperate, hanging limply from the rest of his skull, so he had no way to shout as the man beat the club on the little boy next, flanked by his compatriots.

Then Nicolò had felt a shift in his face, a subtle click, and the pain was gone. He’d stood, making eye contact with the man who had hit him. The man had sneered something in Germanic and turned away.

If Nicolò had lunged then, he would have been killed again, and there would be no way to tell who would be around to witness his next revival. He now carried a secret so damning, so utterly isolating, that he was tempted to fall to his knees and rip the hair from his head, keening up at the heavens at the god he no longer believed was watching.

So he’d done nothing, and he’d wandered the streets in a daze, his eyesight dulled by the blood and smoke of the sacked city. He’d pumped water into his hands from a well in a small piazza, so similar to the ones he’d known back home, and he’d wetted his face, the back of his neck, swallowing long draws from his palms.

Now, as the sun went down, Nicolò considered trying to find a place to hide and commit suicide. Braced up against another wall of another home, somewhere where children had probably played and laughed, he despaired of everything. Maybe he was cursed, and the only way he could die was by his own hand, thereby completing the circle of damnation needed to send him to Hell. Maybe this was Hell. Maybe the Saracen had been his own personal demon, sent to escort him into endless suffering.

Nicolò turned and put his back to the wall, sliding down it and putting his hands together, his fingers squeezing so hard they began to ache. He prayed aloud in Latin, struggling to keep his voice even, then quieted to a hoarse whisper when his prayers turned to the secret he was carrying: “ _Please let me die, please let me die, please let me die_.”

☉

The city was theirs no longer. As the moon rose at the end of the second day, Jerusalem was a pitted corpse, picked clean by flies and waiting to be burned for good. Yusuf had already rejected the trauma of the conflict, saying to himself that because it was not _his_ city, he didn’t truly care.

But he did. He cared so deeply. He ran from street corner to street corner, avoiding the Franks who patrolled and laughed and spat saliva on the walls they passed. He sobbed as he saw fresh bodies, women and children, and old men, and cats and dogs and goats, around every turn, in the doorframes of every home. He was killed once, by a passing Frank who whistled an arrow through his back, to the cheers of the men standing beside him. Yusuf had lain where he fell, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain of the arrow embedded through ribs and into his lung, where it pulsed with agony at every breath after he revived. It was much harder, playing dead this second time, than it had been when he’d waited for the Frank to leave the house with the corpse of his dead friend. But he couldn’t pull the arrow until the invaders had moved on, so he lay like that until he was sure the sound of their footsteps had faded. Then he’d sat up, biting his lip so hard that he felt the trickle of blood down his chin, as he twisted to reach for the arrow. His fingertips brushed the iron-hard shaft several times before they found purchase, and he yanked, and he screamed, and he ran, because the scream would attract attention. The first few long strides had been hard, with his breath hissing through the hole in his back, but it had closed, and his lungs had filled properly, and he’d fled.

He had nothing, no money, no materials, no cart or horse. He needed to escape the city, but he’d become disoriented, losing the layout he’d plotted in his head as he’d explored in the weeks of his semi-imprisonment inside the walls. He couldn’t remember which was the nearest gate, or where it was in relation to where he was now.

A voice hissed at him in Turkic, and his head swiveled. A friendly sound, if indecipherable. The voice hissed again, switching to Persian. “ _Get inside!_ ”

Yusuf went. He slipped through the doorway that had opened just a crack, seeing bodies crammed into the small room. There was no light source inside, and the high moon was waning, as if to tease what little light it gave off already.

“ _What’s your name?_ ”

Yusuf gave it, continuing in Persian. “ _It’s not safe here._ ”

“ _It’s not safe out there, either._ ”

“ _No, but we should keep moving. Get out of the city._ ”

“ _And go where?_ ”

Yusuf hesitated. The invading force had come from Antioch in the north, burning their trail through Anatolia and the rest of the Byzantine empire. “ _Cairo_ ,” he said finally, inciting the others to harsh laughter that was quickly silenced back to the whispered volume they were using for the conversation in the dark.

“ _We won’t make it, child. Stay here with us._ _The invaders will leave soon. Our brothers will come from the east and drive them back_.”

Disgusted by their naïveté, Yusuf sneered, “ _Thinking that doesn’t make it true. You can’t hide in this room forever._ ” He paused, looking around. There were old women, old men, young mothers, children, one teenaged boy with pockmarked cheeks. “ _Is anyone here willing to come with me? I’m going to try for the city walls tonight, before it gets worse._ ”

Silence in the too-warm air of the crowded room. He opened his mouth to speak again, but one of the young women grabbed him, putting her fingers across his lips.

On the other side of the door, Franks were passing by, speaking one of their singsong languages. There were at least three distinct voices, passing the conversation back and forth with answered questions. There was a bark of laughter. So much laughter, coming from these invading pigs. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled. As if this was all just a game.

The voices and the footsteps of the men they belonged to grew closer. Shadows moved in the finger-space between door and frame.

The door opened, and Yusuf launched himself out, taking the closest man down with Ammar’s dagger piercing his neck. He spun, trying for the second man with his scimitar before they could get their bearings. Yusuf’s strike meant all three had to die, quickly, before reprisals could be mete out against the vulnerable ones inside.

He received a blow between the shoulder blades, sending shocks down his spine that made his knees lock and rattle. He grunted, trying to turn, but the third Frank had already raised his sword, bringing it down on top of – and through – Yusuf’s skull.

When he woke, the moon had moved some across the sky, and stars glittered in the fields around it. He tasted blood and spat it out. The taste lingered.

The door had been kicked in and hung now from its hinges. Yusuf turned his head to it, the ache behind his eyes lessening, even as pain, and nausea, gripped his stomach. Then he looked away. No reason to put that image into his memory, even though he knew it was already locked there. He let himself weep for a bit, hoping that another invader would come through the street and kill him again, putting him out of his misery for a few moments. Then he sat up, found Ammar’s dagger where it had dropped, and slid it into his waistband. He knelt in the doorway, mouthing a prayer with his eyes firmly closed. It was as much as he could give, because everything else had been stripped away. He was exposed to the air, a single rose poking up through a layer of snow. It would be up to him, now, whether he would wither or make it through to springtime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nicky's origin as a warrior priest never sat right with me, so he is here under a more generalized sense of duty to his family and religion as the son of a noble family. I created all the other named characters as supplements to canon, as well as tweaked the so-called holes in Joe's canon for what the hell he's doing in Jerusalem when fighting had historically been happening in the region for more than two decades.
> 
> Nearly everything else should be historically, linguistically, and canonically accurate, as I'm challenging myself to write within those confines as much as possible. Please feel free to correct me on anything that might pop up in this or the chapters that follow! I have a very extensive works cited for most of the history and language bits, but I am always willing to learn something new.
> 
> The title is a reference to a poem written by 8th century erotic poet Abu Nuwas, translated by Philip F. Kennedy.


	2. Day Two

☽

Dawn had sprung before Nicolò was aware that time was still passing. It had been night for so long, dark and cold for so long, that he’d briefly wondered if Hell had found a new diversion for him, a new torment equal to his sins. To never see the sun again…

But dawn had come. He lifted his head off of his arms, hidden high off from the street by the flapping of laundry from a line. He’d found the spot and curled miserably into himself, crossing limbs tight around his body, boxing himself in and away from the rest of it. His fellows had consumed the city overnight, and there were fewer screams now, fewer calls to action in Norman and Germanic and Ligurian.

Tears had left sticky tracks down his cheeks, and his eyes were swollen and heavy. He forced himself to stand, his joints creaking like he had aged a thousand years. Maybe every wound healed, every death was snatched right back, but he was not invulnerable in the way of the Roman gods, whose skin never blemished and bodies never ached. He needed sleep that had not come, food that was not nearby.

He was near the southernmost curve of the city walls, far from the two breaches that had brought the stones down into piles of rubble, far from the rising gates that had been opened from the inside to allow entrance for the horses that had trampled the unarmored people in the streets. Far from the fighting. Some Saracens had still put up a fight overnight, men and brothers together in the most foolhardy stand Nicolò had ever seen. But what was the alternative? Fight and die. Flee and die. So much death, and for what? A city they were burning and smearing with blood and brain matter and viscera.

He climbed down from the stacked boxes of architecture, floors becoming ceilings becoming floors again, making it to the street as the first ray of sunlight broke through the spotty clouds in the east. The dawn of a new day.

Most of the night had been spent in watery despair, but it hadn’t been a total waste. Between hiccups, between attempts to slit his wrists that had healed before his very eyes, he had gathered enough of his bearings to determine that he needed a plan. Next steps. To stay here, among the soldiers who had done this, was out of the question. He couldn’t even think on his own actions, before everything had changed in that house. He just needed to run.

He still had his sword. He could easily snatch a horse from an unsuspecting fellow. Which direction he would go, heading towards what destination, he still didn’t know, couldn’t know. He would change his mind and his course a thousand times if he needed to, once he felt safe outside the city walls.

There was another well near his hiding spot, and he drank deeply from it, filling out the dehydration in his skin. He had already removed his chainmail – what was the point of it now, except to clink noisily and drag at his flesh? He sat near the well and wetted his boots, cleaning them of the blood that pooled from the bodies he’d stepped over in the streets, and he tried to rub at the stains on his tunic as well. He needed new clothes. The blood had dried to a putrid brown, and flies had landed on him all night, probing at the taste. Nicolò had gagged again at the thought of it and had spent the night swatting them away.

He heard a body come around the corner. He glanced up, expecting… not expecting this.

It was the Saracen from the house. He had been bloodied more since Nicolò had seen him last, and the fine clothes around him were bedraggled, torn and hanging poorly. He froze when he saw Nicolò, his eyes burning.

Nicolò moved before he realized he was doing it. With a terrible snarl, and with huge effort, he rushed the man barehanded, leaving behind his boots and his sword.

The Saracen tried to dodge away, his hands up, but Nicolò grabbed his wrists and forced him back, pinning him to the wall with their hands held at shoulder-level. He screamed Zeneize directly into the man’s face. If he was truly a demon, he would understand all Earthly languages.

“What are you? How did you do this? Lift the curse right now! Or I will burn your family, burn your home, burn you! Tell me!”

The man bared his teeth against the screams. He gave no sign of understanding the words.

“Give me back my mortality! Let me die! Damn you! Fuck you!”

The Saracen struggled now, trying to pull his wrists free. Nicolò kneed up into the man’s groin and released him. The Saracen huffed, grabbing the tenderness between his legs, and doubled over, moaning.

Nicolò stumbled a few steps backwards, his hands fisting into his messy hair. Demons didn’t have vulnerabilities like that. Demons didn’t bleed when they were cut.

“What are you?” he moaned. “Why… why? Why?!”

The Saracen recovered slowly, making his own sounds of pain. He spoke, his voice cool and breathy, looking up at him with a half-tilted head from where he was curled over himself.

Nicolò wanted to cut his head off, so that he wouldn’t have to hear that voice again. He went back for his sword, momentarily stupid, and then remembered the weapon would do no good. For either of them. The Saracen watched warily as Nicolò took the longsword up in his hand anyway, held out his other palm, and sliced it down to the bird-thin bones. He groaned at the jewel-bright pain and watched the skin knit back together, then held the unblemished palm up, facing the enemy.

“What is it?” Nicolò demanded brokenly, his voice cracking. “Why do we have it?”

The Saracen man straightened to his full height, his dark eyes tracking Nicolò’s descent. He did not understand the words, but he understood the question. He replied a response in Arabic, shaking his head very slightly.

Nicolò’s eyes filled with tears again, his jaw trembling like a child’s, and he turned his face away.

Footsteps came close. Nicolò felt the sword move in his grip as the Saracen put two fingers below the blade, lifting it. Then the man put his other hand against the edge and dragged it upwards, so that a wound opened on his own palm. And healed, just as it had on Nicolò’s. A bead of blood ran down the blade and joined the blood he had left.

They looked at each other, the sword held between them. Something dark flickered in the Saracen’s gaze, his upper lip twitching in disgust.

Nicolò dropped the sword, clattering, to the cobblestones, and bodily shoved the other man away from him. The Saracen stumbled, snarling, and a shout rose up behind them.

“Oi! Stop playing and get on with it!”

Nicolò turned, his heart freezing. Two Genovesi soldiers were coming towards them, holding bloodied weapons casually against their shoulders. Nicolò knew their faces but not their names.

“Di Genova, yeah?” said one, as they drew abreast of him. Now the three of them were facing the Saracen, whose gaze was flicking across their line one at a time, shoulders tense.

“You like to tease, huh?” grinned the second, staring at the lone man with a feral glint.

“Boys—” Nicolò started.

“Where are your shoes, man?”

As a distraction, he gestured at his abandoned boots next to the well, his hands spread wide, his heart pounding so furiously in his chest he thought it must be visible to the others. “I was washing the blood—”

“Hey, don’t get smart!”

The Saracen had edged away from them, but he froze again when the soldier who had shouted lifted his sword.

“I’ll do it if you don’t have the balls, di Genova,” said the second, taking a step forward.

“Don’t—”

The Saracen threw his head back and said something unmistakably insulting, or at least cocky, his sneer and contempt as palpable as the smoke in the air. The Genovese soldier who had stepped forward lunged broadly now. He swatted the Saracen’s arm, tearing his sleeve and arcing a small spurt of blood along the path of the sword point.

“No, you don’t understand—!” Nicolò shouted, tugging the arm of the compatriot who was still beside him. There was only death for the two of them here, because neither he nor the Saracen could allow them to survive to bring the tale of their healing back to any ears who might be crazy enough to believe it. It was their bad luck, and their bullying, that had brought them down this path, and Nicolò wanted it for none of them. But the Genovese shook him off his arm and joined the soldier who was advancing on the wounded enemy, his injured arm held against his body like he was favoring it. Nicolò knew better. The Saracen had already healed by now, back to fighting strength. He was probably calculating how to take on two on one.

“Boys, I can take care of him on my own, if you’d just go back—”

“If you could, you’d’ve done it already, di Genova. Fucking priss.”

Nicolò stabbed him through the lower back, running him through with the longsword he’d dropped, knowing and finding the place where the chainmail could be lifted and avoided. The man gurgled in surprise, trying to twist around and finding that he was speared like an animal. The other soldier bellowed, his attention off the Saracen, who came forward with the small, silver-blue blade as he’d used to cut Nicolò’s throat, the one Nicolò had in turn plunged deep into his chest. So much blood, so much death.

The Genovese soldier who was still standing was the better fighter of all of them, though. He had probably served in other wars, honed by the violence. He elbowed up into the Saracen’s face as he came, stunning him, then turned and went for Nicolò, who was trying to free his sword from the body of the first man, collapsed in an awkward heap. Nicolò felt a blow to the temple that rocked him, and he lost his footing, landing back on one elbow.

The Genovese kicked up into Nicolò’s chin, snapping his head backwards, then brought the same boot down—

☉

The Frank’s limbs twitched, his head a ruin on the cobblestones. Yusuf wasted no time. He drove the dagger into the back of the standing soldier’s neck, curled it, and yanked it back. The second Frank fell straight down, like a puppet with its strings cut.

Three bodies at his feet. Yusuf looked around, wondering if there would be more coming. There was no point in hiding the bodies of the two soldiers who had jeered at him, at his misfortune of being on the wrong side. They would be found, sooner or later, but not before his departure from the city.

There was the problem of the Frank who was appearing more and more like part of a strange, predestined kinship, however. Yusuf wiped the blood from Ammar’s dagger and went to the man, crouching on the balls of his feet near his head.

His eyes were open, sightless, a trickle of blood curling down his jawline from the topmost ear. His skull was misshapen, flat on one side in a way that could only be described as wrong. Yusuf watched and waited, curious and detached like an observer of nature. Maybe this was the secret. Maybe it had to be the head, or the brain. But then he remembered the sword from last night.

The Frank blinked, slowly, mechanically. There was a crunch of bone, a rattle of breath, and he blinked again.

“I think we may need to talk about things,” Yusuf said lightly, watching as the Frank’s eyes moved in their sockets, finding him from the sound. Then his expression closed, screwing up in pain or anguish, his head turning away to the other side as he sat up.

Yusuf moved back, giving him room. When they were both standing, they regarded each other warily. The Frank had killed his own men, rather than let them kill him. It wouldn’t have stuck, they both knew, but the Frank had decided to act to prevent it from even happening. It seemed to Yusuf like a choice that carried a significant weight.

“Well,” Yusuf said. They shared nothing, not a language, not a history, not even a common cause they could unite for. Nothing except the loss of their mortality.

The Frank had been broken by the discovery yesterday, he could see. Or maybe it was more than that. He watched the other man as he went to retrieve his boots by the fountain, his head down like an abused dog, not looking at the bodies of the men who had only yesterday been his brothers-in-arms. Something shone in the back of Yusuf’s mind.

“You’re ashamed,” he said quietly. “Of this war. Of this ravaging of these people. You think this is your punishment, for being a part of it.” But if that were true, Yusuf wouldn’t be similarly afflicted. And he could think of several other men in the Christian army who deserved retribution worse than impermanent death, more than this man did.

“You didn’t have to kill them yourself, you know—”

The Frank screamed something, whipping around on the toes of one foot. If Yusuf had to guess, it had been something like ‘shut up!’, from the tone of voice and the fact that the Frank’s hands were balled into fists.

Yusuf inclined his head a bit, one eyebrow going high in a haughty expression. But he closed his mouth, waiting for the verbal abuse in a language he didn’t understand.

The Frank breathed harshly, then he shook his head, muttering something.

“Hey. _Hey_.” Yusuf waited for the Frank to look back at him. Some things were universal to humanity, and though their words were foreign, the pitches and tones of their voices were not. He put a flat hand onto his chest. “Yusuf.”

The Frank followed the motion, his lips slightly parted.

Yusuf waited a beat, then he curled his hand outwards in a gesture between them, asking. Waiting.

The Frank hesitated. Touched his chest with his fingertips. “Nicolò.”

The rounded syllables of the languages from the northern peninsula. Yusuf practiced soundlessly in the back of his throat, then repeated it back to him, almost perfect.

Nicolò nodded shortly, looking away.

“Nicolò, I am leaving Jerusalem. I think it would be wise for you to do the same.” He accompanied the sentence with more hand movements, pointing out at the curve of the city walls, so close to where they were now. It shouldn’t have surprised him to see him there as well; there weren’t many routes for either of them to take in this new game of survival. The southern gates here would be manned, of course, but it was still barely dawn, and the drowsy guards could be tricked, bribed, or murdered.

The Frank followed the hand gestures and shook his head, pointing directly at Yusuf, then crossing his body with a flat hand, saying his own long, snarling sentence.

“No, you idiot, I’m not saying you should come _with me_ ,” Yusuf said, exasperated, but then he hesitated. Maybe he should. Theirs was a secret that was fundamentally dangerous, damning, and difficult to keep, if there was no one else around to watch for it. Yusuf had no qualms about fighting his way out and down to Cairo, but he would have little control over his own protection if he happened to fall in battle. It had been only dumb luck, and the Franks mission to raze the city of its inhabitants, that had kept his secret from being discovered so far. If one of them were to fall, the other would be there to make sure the persons responsible did not live to see them rise again.

Yusuf turned his head a bit, waiting for the courage to propose it. Then he pointed at Nicolò again, then to himself, then to the city gates. He lifted his knife, then pointed to the other man’s sword. You and me, leave. Fight. Protect.

Nicolò leaned his weight backwards, as if Yusuf was going to capture him somehow. He shook his head.

“Fine,” Yusuf said, rolling his eyes. “Be an obstinate ass.” He turned away, wanting to make it to the gates before the day got any longer.

“Yusuf.”

He turned again, startled despite himself to hear his own name coming from the Frank’s throat.

The Frank’s mouth twisted in a grimace, but he nodded. Pointed the same sequence. You and me, leave. Fight. Protect.

“Good. Let’s go.”

They gathered their things. Nicolò went to the two fallen Genovesi soldiers and busied himself over them for a moment. Yusuf craned his head to see, wondering what in the world he was doing, and then saw him unraveling their belts.

“No, no, no,” Yusuf said, putting a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “If we’re going to—”

Nicolò jerked at the touch and slapped his hand away.

“Easy!” Yusuf said, placating. “I had that idea too, but you shouldn’t be in Christian wear outside the city. Not where we’re going.”

The Frank, of course, had no idea what his meaning was, and this concept was harder to explain with hands. He was stripping the less-bloody of the two soldiers for his clothes, because his tunic and leggings were ruins of themselves, and they needed to be inconspicuous now.

“Wait here, swine,” Yusuf said, adding the insult because he could, because no matter that attaching themselves together had been his idea. It was out of self-preservation, but he didn’t have to like it. He entered the nearest house, calling out for its inhabitants. When none came, as he’d expected, he said a little prayer of forgiveness and for thanks of what the unknown occupants would be providing, touching the doorframe, before going deeper into the home.

When he came out, Nicolò was washing again, scrubbing at his boots like the leather could be saved. He was cross-legged, his torso slightly leaned to the side as he worked. It made him look a little like a child. His hair had fallen over his eyes.

“Nicolò.”

He looked and saw the bundle in Yusuf’s hands, being held out in offering. He shook his head, recoiling as if Yusuf was offering him a poisonous snake.

“For later, then. When we’re not around Christians.” Yusuf folded the fabrics and stored them in a bag that hung from one shoulder. He wished he still had his cart and donkeys, but the beasts would be long destroyed, the cart looted and possibly stolen.

Nicolò finished his war with the boots; they sat limp on the cobblestones beside him, defeated and forlorn from his scrubbing. He slid them on and stood, adjusting his scabbard against the new belt and tunic he wore. The colors were dun and unremarkable, the colors of men going to war, and Yusuf the textiles trader hated to see it. But he didn’t have to like looking at the other man for the partnership to work.

“This way.”

They walked together, the strangest bedfellows Yusuf had personally witnessed lately. He had changed his outfit as well, into a linen that was almost as fine as the ones he bought and sold around the Mediterranean. It was dyed green as moss, complementing the brown of his trousers and the rich cream of his head scarf. He looked once more like the merchant noble he was, like his father had been.

It only took a few minutes for them to reach the gate that looked south out into the hilly scrub desert that surrounded the jewel of the city. There would be some minor villages and settlements as the farmlands spread, but then there would be only desert. They would need more supplies, unless…

Yusuf considered. He hadn’t slept at all overnight, once the truth of his affliction had settled, and barely a few hours the night before, as the city was falling. He felt the familiar tug of exhaustion, a tender weakness in his legs that meant he would need to sit down for a rest sooner rather than later. Once they were further from danger. He’d relieved himself once, and drank from the wells, but he hadn’t eaten, and his stomach, though knotted and tense from the worry, was decidedly empty. Maybe they couldn’t die from injury, but starvation would be a torture, and collapsing to the sand would burn all the same. They still needed to tend to the basics of human life. That, in itself, was actually so great a relief that he felt a swoon of dizziness behind his eyes as it came upon him. He was still human, or partially so. His way of life hadn’t devolved into something monstrous.

They turned a corner, seeing the gates, and Nicolò grabbed his upper arm. For a moment, Yusuf looked for the danger, but then he realized the Frank was pulling him forward, steering him. His grip hurt.

“What are you doing—let go, you bastard!”

Guards at the gate heard the commotion and jeered, calling out to the Frank in their language. He responded in kind, a cheer in his voice that Yusuf hadn’t heard before. Then he leaned close, whispering something from the corner of his mouth. He slid the scimitar on Yusuf’s back out of its sheath, disarming him of the weapon. It mattered little, because he was not as confident with it and had been ignoring it in favor of the knife, but it was a violation all the same.

Yusuf struggled, seeing too late the idiocy of his plan to align himself with a dirty, invading Christian. The guards, both rosy-cheeked like they were feverish, laughed at him as they came, a prisoner in fine green clothes and just a tiny dagger hidden at his waist.

☽

“Trust me,” Nicolò hissed into Yusuf’s ear. He squeezed at the man’s bicep, controlling the arm, and hailed his fellows at the gate, two Normans who spoke unpracticed Genovese at him.

“We’re not taking him back with us,” laughed the first, saying it like the Saracen would be brought on display somewhere, caged and shivering.

“I have orders,” he said, shaking his head at the annoyance of the bureaucracy. “This one’s going back to the camp.” He shook the arm he held a little, causing Yusuf to turn a glare of deepest loathing at him.

“He’s got spirit, don’t he?”

“You have no idea. Can we pass?”

The two nodded them through, looking Yusuf up and down like he was the first Muslim they had ever seen. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you,” said the second.

Nicolò dragged his prisoner forward, going rough when Yusuf tried to dig in his heels a bit. “No, no, it’s okay, I have him!” Nicolò said quickly, raising a hand to stave off the assistance one of the Normans had stepped close to offer. “Stay at your post. Thanks, lads.”

They walked for a bit, heading down the hillside path. They were out of the city limits, but they were not out of sight. It would be ten minutes before Nicolò felt comfortable enough to release Yusuf’s arm.

Yusuf turned and punched, the second rattling blow Nicolò had received in less than an hour. This time he stayed standing, taking it slightly better, but he raised a hand to clasp against the bruise that would already be rising and falling, crying out a protest. “It worked, didn’t it?”

The Saracen pointed at himself, then shook his head, then put his wrists together in a fabrication of shackles. He spat something as he did it.

 _I am not a prisoner_.

Nicolò made a noise of frustration. It was too much, to have a partner in this mire with whom he could not properly communicate. “I know you’re not,” he snarled back. “It was just a ruse.” But there were no hand signals for this, so he had to say it and leave it be. He handed the scimitar back, angling its hilt out for Yusuf to take. “We need food and water.” When Yusuf had sheathed the sword into the clever scabbard at his back, Nicolò brought his hands up to his mouth, feeling slightly foolish, before miming the food and drink of which he spoke, smacking his lips together and tilting a drinking cup against his teeth like a parent parroting to a toddler.

Yusuf’s eyebrows raised, but he nodded, the barest gleam of amusement sparkling in the crow’s feet that folded around his eyes.

☉

“Thank you for your generosity,” Yusuf said, bowing to the old woman standing in the doorway. His arms were full of food, dried meats and fruits wrapped in handkerchiefs, and Nicolò was standing further down the hill of the small abode, holding waterskins that he’d filled from the well on the property.

The woman smiled and waved him off with a blessing. She had offered them more, but Yusuf had refused, even with the coins he had been able to pass to her, taken from the Genovesi soldiers and no doubt pilfered from others before them. She and her family were lucky enough to live south, beyond the path of destruction that the Christian army had carved into the hillsides, but now that Jerusalem had fallen, they were in danger. Yusuf had even asked them to come with them, saying that they’d be accompanied by two seasoned veterans of the skirmishes, escorted to safety beyond the reach of the war. But the woman had seen Nicolò, and she’d seen Yusuf’s desperation, and she’d murmured thanks but no. “I won’t leave my home. My family won’t abandon our land.” They had sheep and rows of grain, fodder that was far too easy to slaughter and burn.

Yusuf wasn’t in the position to insist. He wasn’t trying to be selfish, but he had himself to think about, and he wouldn’t argue when there was no point to it. He wouldn’t waste precious time – there was too much distance they still needed to put between themselves and the Christians. So he bowed again and returned to the man who had become his companion, packing the food away into their bags.

“Cairo,” he’d said, after Nicolò had mimed ‘where?’, spreading his arm across the horizon and then turning back with an exaggerated quizzical look. He repeated the name, slowing through the syllables, and realized the name in Arabic was too dissimilar to its counterpart in Ligurian. He held up a triangle with his fingers.

And Nicolò shook his head. “Ashkelon,” he’d said in response, Yusuf recognizing it immediately as the southern port town.

“What would be there for us?” Yusuf had asked, exasperated, thinking about it even as he asked. Ships, and a sail away from the kingdom of Jerusalem. He paused, then nodded. “All right. Ashkelon.”

With food and water, the day’s journey to the port city would be less treacherous. They had lost a few hours obtaining the food from a friendly homestead and would almost certainly have to camp overnight before they reached it. Yusuf only hoped the Frank did not snore.

☽

Nicolò readjusted his shoulder blades, leaning in repose against a boulder. The sun had set spectacularly that night, splashing red across the clouds, and he’d felt a fist close around his heart. It was the red of the blood that had splattered against the mosaics and frescoes he had admired in the city he had helped sack. It had been a relief when the darkness of night had crept over the land. At least there were stars out.

Yusuf was already asleep, his back to the fire and Nicolò himself in a move that he couldn’t decide if he regarded as brave or foolish. It’s not as though the Saracen had anything to fear from him in the end. Maybe Nicolò could kill, rob, and abandon him, but that wouldn’t mean death, and wasn’t that the only thing man truly feared?

His eyelids were heavy. He craved sleep in the way of childhood, when the only thing he could think about was how tired he felt, how good it would feel to sink away into the bliss of nothingness. He had tried to pray, but it had stuck in the back of his throat like rancid olive oil. Shapes and shadows danced in front of his eyes, tricks from the campfire they’d built from the scrub around them to keep away the desert cold that fell once the sun was gone. His skin felt poisoned, a rot that spread from toes to fingers.

Then he felt free. Wind streamed onto his face, bringing the smells of the forest. A woman’s face, laughing, hair unbound and curling behind her as she raced on horseback. A second woman, eyes narrowed as she aimed, loosed, struck, her arrow quivering in the body of a grouse. She laughed too, and turned to look at the first woman. Then they were kissing, the shorter one swept backwards by their passion.

Nicolò jerked, heat flooding his body.

Yusuf was moving on the other side of the campfire, rubbing his face with one hand. He rolled and sat up, his sleep disturbed. Their eyes met briefly.

Nicolò turned his face, shifting slightly away from the campfire. He’d been too close to it, received too much of its warmth. He folded his arms in front of his chest, found the softest part of the boulder with the back of his head, and let himself relax again. The dream had been strange, but it was better than nightmares.

The next sleep was dreamless and kind, and when he woke at dawn, he did not remember the faces of the women. Only a lingering smell of pine hinted at whatever the dream had been.


	3. Days Nine and Ten

☉

They were in Attalea, having passed through Cyprus on two separate ship voyages that they were keen to avoid in the future. Both weren’t particularly able seamen, and the only advantage that sailing had offered – time – was not of as much concern to them now that they were out of Judea. So they were in this new city, a mainland outpost surrounded by mountains with no roads in or out, preparing for a journey on foot.

The outpost was multicultural, harboring ships of every Mediterranean ilk and then some, and both Yusuf and Nicolò had enjoyed a few hours of fluent conversation with others while they passed through. They had met a diminutive scholar on the ship that had taken them to Cyprus, a mole-faced man who spoke Ligurian as well as he spoke Arabic and Greek, all on top of his native Occitan. He had spent a peculiar afternoon translating between the two of them, their first true conversation that nearly ended in a fist fight as they strayed too close to the reason they were together in the first place. The scholar had had to stand between them, his hands on either man’s chest, pleading for them to calm down. But all the while he had translated, repeating the words like ‘healing’ and ‘curse’ and ‘bastard’ without appearing to wonder about them.

Later, both Yusuf and Nicolò had apologized and thanked him profusely for his generosity. They couldn’t explain exactly why they were together, but it had helped that they could express some of the ideas that had been ruminating in their minds, unable to be voiced properly and frustrating like constipation.

The scholar had grinned, said that it had been the most exciting night of his journey so far, and thanked them in turn for exercising his tongue. He also gave a firm no when they asked if he would join them on their travels, which neither really expected him to accept, and they waved him off the ship when it docked the next morning.

Yusuf had finally convinced Nicolò to wear the more Muslim-style dress that he’d pilfered from the house. Firstly, it was better suited for the summer, cool linen instead of wool, and it attracted less attention than the too-obvious soldierly tunic and leggings. While his ash-colored hair and pale eyes were not exactly unique in the melting pot of Cyprus and the southern coast of the Byzantine empire, it went better for them that they wore similar manners of dress, especially when they walked together. They could be business partners now, rather than enemies on either side of a conflict that had ended in massacre.

It was late afternoon when they finally departed the city, wishing to spend the night camped in the wilderness rather than in any of the rooms they could rent in the trading city. They had exchanged their labor for passage on the ships and had spent a day or two in Cyprus, working physical jobs in order to feed and shelter themselves in an uncomfortable shed at the edge of the shipyard. There was no money left over for a proper room. They had idled in the streets while waiting for the moment to leave the city by land, which normal travelers didn’t do; no highways or roads led to the city from those directions, and passers-by would think it very odd indeed to see two men walking the hills and scaling the even sharper mountains that surrounded the outpost as if they were unbound by the laws of humanity.

Since they were, and since they had acquired a parchment map of dubious veracity that would guide them all the way to Constantinople, they felt confident in their choice of continuing their journey over land. One of the many triggers for their fight over the head of the scholar had been what, if any, their final objective was. It wasn’t like there was a normal life either of them could return to. Yusuf felt untethered, like a banner that had been sheared from its pole. The most they could agree on was to find their way to the megalopolis of Constantinople and decide what to do from there. Whether they would remain together, and whether their curious immortality would have expired by then, remained to be seen.

The first few hours outside were spent on flat land, all grasses and shrubs. The mountains were purple from the distance, and they thought they wouldn’t reach them for at least a day or so. Because they were on foot, they had an easier though slower time of it, walking over the golden, rocky soil mostly in silence. The heat was stifling, and Yusuf took a drink from his waterskin, hoping they would find a water source to refill with before too long.

Nicolò had quieted in the days since their partnership began. Yusuf watched him side-along, first wondering if he was simmering, then learning later that he was just laconic. He didn’t expend his energy in socializing like it was a currency to be earned and traded; he was the one who hung back while they bought food from a stall, watching the crowds of people walking in every direction behind them, in case a thief came up with ill intentions. He was the one who sat up later at night, oiling their swords – so soon into it all, he had taken up that chore without discussion – and waiting for danger that hadn’t yet come. Yusuf had wondered if his own garrulousness, his verbal hums and sighs and one-word questions, annoyed the Frank, and that had been one of the questions posed with the scholar as their aide. Nicolò’s mouth had quirked, and he’d said in quickly-translated Ligurian, “If you ever get to the point of annoyance, you’ll know.”

That night, as the wild darkness settled and yawned around them, Yusuf lay back on one of the thin bedrolls they had acquired, his arms crossed behind his head. He lifted one arm, pointing straight up. “قمر,” he said, _qamar_.

Nicolò had been studying their map by campfire light. Parchment was an expensive luxury, but maps were all the rage for the explorers and traders of the Mediterranean, and production of them had increased. They weren’t sure how accurate it was, but that was the trouble with cartography – no one had an eye on the surface of the world except birds, and they kept their secrets. He glanced up from the map at Yusuf’s distraction, following the line of Yusuf’s arm.

“ _Lùnn-a_ ,” he said in response, bringing his gaze back down to meet Yusuf’s over the light of their fire.

Yusuf smiled, nodded. “ _Lùnn-a_ ,” he repeated back.

“ _Qamar_ ,” Nicolò attempted, Yusuf nodding again at the pronunciation, which had been admirable.

And the next morning, as Yusuf woke groggily – he slept heavy, especially lately, with Nicolò always on guard nearby – he heard: “ _Sô_.” He turned, pushing up from his belly and side, blinking at the morning.

Nicolò was shading his eyes with a hand, pointing at the far line of the eastern horizon, back where they had been. Yusuf cleared his throat and replied, “شمس.” _Šams_.

They each tried the other, smiling gently at their clumsy tongues.

Moon and sun.

☽

The knife in Nicolò’s hand slipped, and he grunted as the sharp blade nicked into his jaw. He pulled it away and pressed his fingers to the wound, waiting for it to close. The trouble, he had begrudgingly come to accept, was that their healing was not a salve against pain. Nor did it make his muscle memory any more skilled.

He was shaving. Yusuf’s silver-blue knife was not meant for this purpose, but he’d been carrying an increasingly uncomfortable layer of scruff since leaving Jerusalem, and it was time for it to come off. Yusuf himself had seemed to have traded something of his for a stint in a barber’s chair, because Nicolò had left his side to purchase the map and reunited with him with his own thick beard newly rounded, his fingers scratching at the sides in approval as he felt the work for himself.

His partner’s voice sounded off to the side, and Nicolò’s torso swiveled where he was sitting cross-legged to find it. It had been a question, rising slightly at the end.

“I’m fine,” Nicolò said dismissively, although he was never sure exactly if what he was replying was accurate or germane. Neither of them were. They needed the other’s language. Soon, someday.

Yusuf came and crouched in front of him, holding his hand out for the knife. His face was close, their eyes beholding the other.

“You want to do it?” Nicolò asked, slightly bewildered at the offer, a small gesture moving the knife in his hand.

Yusuf nodded, flexing his fingers in a ‘give-it-here’ sign.

Nicolò relinquished the knife, suddenly sitting very still. It had long passed the point where they felt fear at a weapon in the other’s hand, but he wasn’t sure what to expect.

Yusuf settled cross-legged himself, the tops of their knees touching as he scooted as close as he could go. He said something, putting his other hand out. His thumb and first finger gripped Nicolò’s chin, pulling it slightly closer. Then he said something else.

_Lean forward. Stay still._

It’s what Nicolò would have said, in his place. He obeyed, the fire of Yusuf’s fingers on his chin burning away any urge to fidget. The knife dragged down along his cheek, scraping and irritating. In one of the tiniest advantages so far, Nicolò knew the razor burn would heal, leaving behind smooth skin that he didn’t deserve, shaving as he was without any oil or fat concoctions to lessen the rash.

Yusuf began to hum as he worked, slightly off-key but commendable all the same. In a proper barber’s setting, this silence would be filled with conversation and gossip, a masculine relaxation and exchange that they were missing out on as two technically-speechless men in the wilds of the empire. Nicolò relaxed as the time went on, but he couldn’t quite find a comfortable place to rest his gaze. The obvious place, directly ahead, was filled with Yusuf’s face, taut with concentration, and he couldn’t let his eyes linger there for too long without feeling a sickly nervousness, like it was rude to stare.

When it was done, Yusuf grinned and said something that could have been ‘done!’, said triumphantly like an artist completing his masterpiece. Nicolò smiled himself, the enthusiasm infectious, and rubbed his hands along his cheeks, the prickles gone, the skin polished smooth. “ _Gràçie_.”

Yusuf repeated it back to him, just as they’d done the night before. Nicolò nodded. This was the beginning. It would be slow, but they needed it.

The rest of the day, into their walk to the mountains beyond Attalea, they compared vocabulary. They took turns, easing into the practice like schoolboys playing a guessing game. They’d pick something easy, something obvious – they couldn’t start with dream, or hunger, or beautiful, so they pointed and said one word at a time: “Hand. Sky. Green.” Sometimes it went wrong; Nicolò pointed up at the sky and said the word Yusuf had used for it earlier.

Yusuf shook his head, his gaze up and searching the vast expanse of sky, before finding a small cloud in the distance, pointing to it, and using the word there.

Nicolò rolled his eyes then repeated the word back to him. It had been cloud, then, not sky, that the Saracen had been identifying earlier in the day, when there had been more clouds hanging in the crystal blue above them. Maybe he should have known, but this was difficult. It had taken him a few guesses to realize that the word _akhdar_ was for the rich green color of Yusuf’s shirtfront, not the garment itself. Nicolò had pointed to his own shirt and repeated it back, but Yusuf had shaken his head, searched the ground around them for something, and plucked a blade of grass between his fingers. He stepped close, holding the grass out for Nicolò to take. “اخضر,” he said. Then he gripped a pinch of Nicolò’s shirtfront, the light linen wrinkling between his fingers. “ازرق,” he said for it. _Azraq_ , blue. Nicolò’s Muslim dress was a pale sky-blue, not unlike the color of the heavens above them, in the same style and quality as Yusuf’s mossy green. He was more comfortable in it, for several reasons, and he now privately agreed that it was better for him to be wearing it. Privately, this was thought, only because he couldn’t express his gratitude out to the other man without the little scholar they had left behind in Cyprus.

Nicolò said both colors back to him, first _vèrde_ , then _bleu_ , going back and forth between their chests with a pointing finger. There was a lot of pointing lately, and lots of head shakes. He went ahead with the next vocabulary as they turned back, continuing on the trail. Yes and no, he said, demonstrating with more exaggeration. He repeated the Arabic after Yusuf tried the Zeneize. They would use these almost exclusively in the days coming.

They were following a goat path, narrow and barely visible but definitely there, cutting into the sides of the foothills and baby mountains of the range they had steadily approached as the day wore on. The incline had begun gradually as they left the outskirts of the city the day before, a sharp pull in the muscles of their calves as they traveled north. It had been trees and grassland until the ridge of mountains, and now it was goat paths and rocky rubble. They would skirt around the footprints of the biggest mountains, but they had to go north as much as possible, even if the straight line meant cutting diagonally across harder traversal.

Yusuf was walking in front of him, head slightly down as he watched his feet taking the steps on the trail the wild goats had carved for them. He was humming again, the game of words halted for now. They could take it up again when they sat for a rest during the worst heat of the afternoon. Nicolò was taking mental stock of their food supplies in the packs on their shoulders. They should have bought a packmule in the city. He would trade for one when they next came upon a homestead. It was hard thinking of everything that needed to be done for survival, and that was even after the knowledge that they couldn’t die if they got it wrong. They could suffer, of course, wallowing in the misery of starvation or dehydration or illness, of that much Nicolò was sure; even immortality didn’t take away the agony of human life. But even if they were to run out of food, they could go on until they managed to startle a nervous rabbit from its burrow or pick cherries from a lucky find.

Deep in these thoughts, he nevertheless heard the thunder as soon as it began. He looked up high on their left, walking as they were on the hillside beside a sharp incline. He gave a startled cry and then lunged, shoving the other man clear as something heavy struck his shoulder and head, bringing him down into instantaneous darkness.

☉

“Nicolò!” Yusuf cried, scrambling up from the heap in which he had sprawled on the ground. He had heard the rockslide, but he hadn’t had a chance to react to it before feeling the hands on his shoulder blades, the force propelling him away from the boulders. He regained his footing and watched in cold horror as the face of the hillside melted away only a meter from where he was standing.

Rocks and dirt were flowing like water, the contained edge of it as sharp as a riverbank. The golden dirt boiled and poured, bringing along larger chunks of earth that crumbled into themselves as the momentum carried them, disintegrating into more dust. Solid rocks bounced on top, skipping on the surface like thrown stones. After what felt like an eternity, the energy of the landslide abated, petering out as the soil settled once more.

“Nicolò!” Yusuf called, looking down the incline of the ridge. His partner had disappeared into the earth, beyond the line of trees and shrub that the landslide had covered over like foam on beer. He tested the dirt with one foot, probing at whether it would hold his weight or consume any step he took like thick snow. The springy dirt collapsed only slightly beneath him, its density enough to walk on. Satisfied, Yusuf slid down the soil, following the line of the landslide to the end of it, where the largest boulders and chunks of rocky earth had come first and farthest, the impetus for the entire ordeal.

He saw nothing but scrub brush and rocks and dirt.

“Nicolò, say something!”

Buried, surely. Horror at the thought of it brought Yusuf down to his knees, digging at handfuls of the soft dirt. If Nicolò was dead, or even unconscious, beneath the landslide, he would wake soon enough, covered over by the flow. And he would find no air when he did.

Yusuf spent at least ten minutes digging, and then another ten minutes scrabbling around the furthest edge of the settled landslide, shifting the largest rocks away, his muscles popping, sweat pouring from his hairline. He called every few minutes, just in case he had dug deep enough for the sound to penetrate. Whether Nicolò would be able to answer was another question entirely, but maybe if he was awake to hear, he would be gladdened to know that Yusuf was looking for him.

Then, suddenly: the touch of something soft beneath his fingertips, which were tearing and healing over and over from the rough texture of the soil. Yusuf’s heart leapt. He scraped the edge of his hand over the place where he’d felt it and saw a flash of sky-blue, turned almost cream from the dust of the soil.

“Nicolò, Nicolò, I’ve got you,” he said, almost under his breath, working around the scrap of linen shirt he had found. He dug even more furiously now, clearing large swathes of the dirt with his arm, ignoring the mild pain of being scratched and scraped by the motions. He had to work as quickly as possible.

He found the first flash of skin, beneath a tear in the lovely sky-blue linen, and he put his hand to it, gripping momentarily, before continuing to dig and clear. Slowly the shape of the man began to form, like he was uncovering the long-buried skeleton of an ancestor. Like those dead, Nicolò was not moving.

Yusuf was breathing heavily now, the acrid taste of the dirt burning his tongue, coating his teeth, but he didn’t let up, now that he was so close. He first went one way down the body and then the other, when it was revealed that he was going down his torso instead of up. He wanted to uncover Nicolò’s face first before anything else. The Frank was on his belly where he was buried, so Yusuf had to hook his bleeding fingers beneath an arm and pull, pull, pull, the weight of the body as well as the dirt compacted on top of it a barrier to his success.

“Nicolò, I’ve got you,” he said, brushing away a new handful of rocky earth to feel the sweep of hair. He worked even faster now, both hands clawed beside the man’s buried face in order to open up room for the dirt that was masking him, forcing it to fall away from the sheer force of his own digging. Then he used his hands with gentler motions, brushing dirt from a neck, a cheek, the very tiniest sliver of forehead.

“Wake up,” he instructed. He put both hands beneath the heaviness of Nicolò’s skull and tugged, torqueing a twist into his arms and feeling the moment when the weight shifted, Nicolò’s body relinquished from where it had been imprisoned.

Yusuf turned him onto his back and pulled his head and chest into his lap, wiping grit from his skin. “Hey. Hey. Nicolò.” He touched his cheek. Warm, but the dirt was hot too, baked by the summer heat.

A jolt ran through the other man’s body, reminding Yusuf of the first scream of newborn babies, that first gasp of air into tiny lungs. Yusuf’s torso rocked with an answering wave of relief, putting his hand flat on the chest to witness the pulse of heartbeat and breath.

Nicolò inhaled through a suddenly-open mouth, but not before expelling a cough full of dust and sand. He choked and spat, the golden earth on his lips and chin turning brown from saliva. Clotted blood mixed thickly with more dirt colored the side of his head.

“That’s it, Nicolò. Breathe, you can do it. Good job.” Yusuf found himself breathing deep and slow as he watched, as if he was showing the other man how to do it, the timing of their breaths coming together.

Nicolò coughed and coughed, the air going raspy down a throat damaged by suffocation and grit. His eyes were squeezed closed, the eyelashes caked with more dirt. Yusuf wiped at them for him, bringing tears that helped clear the rest of it.

“Take it easy for a moment,” Yusuf said. “Just breathe.”

“Yusuf.”

“Yes, I’m here, _sci_ ,” he said, using the last word they had exchanged before the landslide. “ _Sci_ , yes. You’re all right.”

Nicolò coughed and spat, taking in great breaths now like he was greedy for them, but he was relaxing in Yusuf’s arms, the pace of his breathing slowing. He rasped out a longer sentence, nothing that Yusuf knew yet.

“ _Sci_ , brother, yes, you’re okay.”

It took several long minutes before the recovery felt complete enough for Yusuf to let go of his hold on the other man, and longer still before either of them returned to his feet. When they did, they went together, Yusuf’s hand supporting beneath Nicolò’s elbow before the Frank pulled away, wobbly and caked head-to-toe with a fine layer of dust.

“You didn’t have to push me,” Yusuf said, his brow furrowed. It was useless, expressing this, but it was now the second time the man he was increasingly coming to regard as his partner had stepped into danger for him.

Inexplicably, Nicolò seemed to understand this time. Maybe it was the tone of voice, or the context of the repetition, so similar to the incident with the two soldiers. This time, Nicolò held his gaze and nodded slowly, saying something in his injured, rock-harsh voice.

Yusuf ached for the time when they would fully understand each other, when they could express gratitude and partnership. For now, he put his hand out and squeezed the top of Nicolò’s shoulder, speaking in touch and facial expressions and emotional ambience, before turning them away to head back to the road to Constantinople.


	4. Days Thirty-five and Thirty-six

☽

Languages rang out in the streets, as widely varied and song-sung as music. The city was so full of life that it had been overwhelming, their first steps bringing them back to society after nearly a month of travel with only the two of them and the stars to witness it. They had skulked during those first few hours, hugging the edges of the streets like there was a tugging force in the center that they were fighting against. Carpenters and clerks and constables hurried and shouted, their business insisting and time-urgent. Nicolò and Yusuf had no part of it and were thus expelled from the hustle, relegated to the sidelines to observe and bear their history together.

They had taken up a single room of an inn above a brewery with rats and rodents of the human variety, but the bed was soft and large enough for two. They shared without compunction, though Yusuf tended to spread-eagle. Nicolò often found himself having to shove the other man’s limbs away from him at night, especially as the summer heat swelled when the fermenting tanks in the basement oozed their stench and warmth upwards.

Today they were sitting at a small table outside a food stall, basking and relaxed. “Friend or foe?” Yusuf asked, leaning into Nicolò’s shoulder to indicate with a bob of his chin at a very large man in very white clothes further down the road. The stranger was gesticulating and had attracted a small crowd in a horseshoe shape around him as he shouted.

It was a game they played. “Friend,” Nicolò said, smiling lightly. “Actor.”

Yusuf didn’t know the word, but he understood when Nicolò put one hand to his chest and another to his forehead, tipping his eyes and head back like a sufferer in a Greek tragedy. The other man grinned, first at the dramatics of Nicolò’s performance, then at the street performer who had raised both fists to the sky and begun reciting a Greek monologue.

“ _Friend or foe_?” Nicolò said, this time in Arabic, throwing his gaze over to a loitering man on the side of the street opposite them wearing a knife at his hip and an ugly anger at the world on his face.

“ _Foe_ ,” Yusuf said, his own gaze darkening. A pickpocket or hired thug, no doubt. They both checked their own weapons out of habit. Yusuf, while moderately proficient, had recently excelled in his swordplay as they sparred beside their campfire at night, and while Nicolò couldn’t say that he had ever been, well, _great_ , practice against Yusuf’s speed and agility had honed his reflexes enough to feel a pride that he hadn’t carried before.

“Friend or foe?”

Nicolò looked. Yusuf had been facing over his shoulder, indicating a new target for their game.

“Friend!” Nicolò cried, choking on the word as he stood clumsily, his knee knocking the table with their wooden cups of sweet wine. “Giuseppuccio!”

The man he was calling threw his hands up in triumph, his face alighting from the investigatory squint it had been in before. “I knew it was you!” he called in proper Zeneize.

They came together in a hug in the middle of the street, but they had to quickly dodge away from an ox-driven cart with a swearing man on top. Nicolò led him back to the table, nodding along to the rapid babble of his friend from home.

“I knew it was you. I saw your face and thought, ‘That can’t be him’, and yet look at you! Here in Constantinople, of all places! What in the world are you wearing?” Giuseppe flicked a finger at the shoulder of Nicolò’s Muslim-cut shirt. “And who is this?”

Both had been asked with such scorn that Nicolò was caught by surprise. “Yusuf al-Kaysani,” he said, nodding at his friend. “Giuseppe Ratto.” A nod at his other friend.

Giuseppe’s dark eyes flicked back to Nicolò after taking in Yusuf’s shape, up and down. There had not been a smile of greeting in that look. “What are you doing in Constantinople? I thought you went off with the army.”

There was danger here. Nicolò adjusted his weight in the chair, nodding with what he hoped was a casual expression. “I did. We were released after our victory in Jerusalem, the ones who fought the hardest.” It was a subtle brag, designed to trip Giuseppe’s assumptions. “I am going back west.”

“Why didn’t you just sail? Is he traveling with you?” Giuseppe did not look at Yusuf this time.

“He is. We’re business partners.”

“Business partners! In what?” Finally, Giuseppe turned back to Yusuf, an unconcealed sneer across his large jaw. “What could this dog possibly know about how our civilization works?”

Nicolò thanked a god he no longer believed in that Yusuf did not yet speak Ligurian well enough to understand the words. He wouldn’t have blamed him if his friend had thrown a punch over them.

“More than you would think,” Nicolò said, playing along and keeping his tone light, though his stomach knotted at what felt like betrayal of Yusuf’s abilities and character. There was no way Giuseppe would be able to appreciate an explanation of what he’d seen in Yusuf’s soul over the month of their partnership, his generosity, his intelligence, his ability to laugh and make laughter. “We are going to make a lot of money.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Giuseppe snorted. Turning to Yusuf again, he cocked his head sarcastically, asking, “You’re not planning on slitting his throat and leaving him in the desert to die, are you?”

“He doesn’t speak Zeneize,” Nicolò said quietly.

“Are you telling me you speak his mongrel language?”

“ _It’s okay. Friend, promise-please-it’s okay_ ,” Nicolò said in Arabic, stringing the cadence of the words together like it was a complete sentence. He held Yusuf’s eyes, communicating with them as much as he was with the words.

“ _Trust_?” Yusuf murmured. That had been a hard one: Yusuf had held out his sword, and when Nicolò had taken it in his hand, bewildered, Yusuf had come close, manipulating his grip so that the point of the scimitar touched his breastbone. They had held that pose for a long beat, like subjects sitting for a portrait, before Yusuf asked for Nicolò’s longsword with his hand. When he had it, he turned the sword on him, holding its point in the same position. “ _Trust_ ,” he’d said then, the word for the concept.

“ _Yes_ ,” Nicolò said now, nodding. “ _Thank you_.”

Yusuf nodded back slowly, his gaze sliding back to Giuseppe. The smoldering look behind his eyes had not let up.

“What an onslaught for the ears,” Giuseppe said conversationally, as if remarking on the weather. “Well, Nico, I have to say, this is not where I saw you ending up.”

“Oh, we’re only just beginning, Giuseppuccio,” Nicolò replied, using the diminutive in return, veiling his disgust with calm.

“Come have a drink?”

“Love to. Yusuf—”

“Haha, no, no.” Giuseppe waved his hand as he got to his feet, dismissing Yusuf like a servant. “Just you. I don’t need him lurking. I can’t even tell him how silly those curls are! Like a girl’s.”

A flash of anger ignited in Nicolò’s gut as he stood as well. “No need to be rude, Giuseppe.”

“Rude?” Giuseppe snorted in the back of his throat. “He can’t understand me, can he? Not even civilized, God in heaven.” He said this under his breath but not to himself, letting Nicolò hear. “No, Nico, just us two men.”

Yusuf had followed them into standing. Nicolò saw, but their new companion did not, the knife in Yusuf’s hand that he’d been concealing beneath the table. As soon as they had sat down that knife had been drawn, in case there was danger. It probably wasn’t until Nicolò had reassured him that the knuckles on Yusuf’s hand around the blade’s hilt had gone back to olive, from white.

“ _You, inn_ ,” he said to Yusuf, feeling wretched, unable to shake the feeling that he was banishing him from the room like a punished dog. “ _Me, drink_.”

“ _Not me_?”

Nicolò hadn’t heard that version before, but he understood the context. Even now, during all this, they were learning, teaching. “ _I’m sorry_.” And he was. He wished he had not agreed to Giuseppe’s offer.

Yusuf’s expression closed, but not before Nicolò read the hurt there. They hadn’t been apart for very long over the past month – a total of a few hours, at the most – but every time had been for a purpose, a mutually-agreed pact of teamwork and camaraderie. This was nothing but bullying, being nasty. Nicolò almost turned back to Giuseppe to feign a stomachache when he was dragged by a big hand around his shoulder amid a cry of, “Hurry up, you slug!”

“Giuseppe, you didn’t need to exclude my friend—”

“Friend!” The big man snorted again. He often repeated things back as if he couldn’t believe they had been spoken in the first place. Nicolò had always been mildly annoyed by this habit, but right now it made his teeth itch. “Listen, Nico, if you’re in some kind of trouble—”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just that it’s strange. Seeing you here in Constantinople with a fucking Berber.”

“What are _you_ doing here?” Nicolò countered.

Giuseppe guffawed. “There’s a story, my boy!” He launched into it, dragging Nicolò along with his heavy arm slung across his shoulders. Nicolò managed to turn his head just enough to catch a glimpse of Yusuf’s back melting into the crowded street, leaving him behind.

Nicolò didn’t return to their room until well after midnight. He was not drunk; he had, in fact, discovered for the first time that he could no longer get absolutely pissfaced. But it was dark, and he was wobbly with cursory inebriation. He knew his breath reeked of alcohol. It was lucky, then, that they were staying above a brewery.

He climbed the external staircase leading to the top floor of the building, where the rooms were stacked inside along the upper hallway, and made it to the door of the room he and Yusuf shared, sobering more and more by the second. It wasn’t just his healing, he knew, but dread at what he might see when the door opened.

The door opened, and in the darkness Yusuf was just visible beneath the blanket, a solitary curl of body and a halo of soft hair.

Relief flooded Nicolò’s body, so sharp against his hot skin that he almost imagined he could feel the remaining alcohol evaporating from him like it had been left out under the sun. “Yusuf?” he whispered.

“Sleep,” came the curt reply. Immediate. He had not been asleep.

“Sorry.” Nicolò hurried out of his boots and slid under the blanket. The bed was up against the wall, directly opposite the door to the room on its long side, and Yusuf was trapped behind him. He stilled, lying on his back, though he wanted to shift into a more comfortable spot on the slightly-lumpy mattress.

He stayed like that for a while, his heart thumping in his chest with an anxiety he couldn’t explain. He hadn’t been this uncomfortable around the other man in a long time.

“Dog,” said Yusuf, so suddenly and coming from so close beside him in the church-quiet room that Nicolò jumped.

“What?”

“Dog.”

He understood immediately. Of all the words in Ligurian that Giuseppe had jabbered, that was the only one they had taught each other, and Giuseppe had been looking directly at Yusuf while he said it.

Guilt wound its poison around his throat. “I’m sorry, Yusuf,” he murmured, once he had regained control over it. “I didn’t know he was going to be like that. I didn’t know… I used to be like that. I must have been. I shouldn’t have let him talk about you like that, and I’m sorry.”

The room was quiet again. Yusuf did not have to forgive him. Nicolò turned onto his side to face the other man. Yusuf’s back was to him, the halo of his curls just visible against the pillow.

“Do you think we’ll dream of them again tonight?” he whispered.

The women had come to both of them. It had taken them several days, nearly a fortnight, to realize that when one was roused in an agitation they could not explain, the other was too, and the dreams they had had were shared: two women, dark-haired and willowy with their strength and grace. Never in the same place twice, never in the same scene, though always together, always both of them. They had used the dreams as opportunities to exchange several words they wouldn’t have normally had the context for, like woman and dream, but they couldn’t yet discuss the implications.

The sharing of it had Nicolò the most concerned. It had to be connected, somehow, to their immortality, which was the only other thing they shared. And the dreams had started the first time they had been asleep, lying beside the same campfire, after killing one another. That had to mean something.

It wasn’t every night, though. Sometimes it went days before they dreamed of them again, and sometimes it was every night in a row, on and on, glimpses and feelings of the women laughing and fighting and traveling. If Nicolò still had his faith in God, he would have thought these were prophecies somehow, messages from the Almighty.

But he didn’t, so he didn’t.

Yusuf had not replied, but he knew he was still awake. The ridge of his back was held too tense, the pace of his breathing too refined. After a long beat of sighing silence, Nicolò rolled back onto his back, closed his eyes, and let himself fall.

☉

It was not a night for the women. Yusuf was dreaming, but it was more sensory than the peeking moments in time for the strangers. He could taste almonds and feel water lapping at his feet. He was calm and warm. There were seabirds calling in the distance, and a ship’s bell tolling.

He was wrenched upwards from the dream by a bigger sound, a slam, a scuffle. Yusuf struggled, fighting the remnants of the dream, fighting his sluggish reflexes beneath the blanket. Barely-there moonlight was peeking in from the tiny window above the bed, throwing just enough contrasting light onto the bodies that were writhing in the middle of the room like snakes, twisting and curling around each other.

Yusuf threw himself up, bouncing on his knees until he got his footing on the floorboards, but the door was already slamming closed behind the shapes of men who were dragging, kicking, fighting.

“Nicolò!” he shouted, for he was alone in the room for the heartbeat of time it took him to reach the door and throw it open, following barefoot and barehanded. He should have grabbed his knife, but there had been no time. He had to follow, because he didn’t want to think what would happen if he lost track of the kidnappers.

All around him down the hallway as he chased, there was a stirring, sleepers roused from their beds and lighting lamps, asking bed partners if they heard the commotion too. Yusuf pounded after the men, gaining on them, as encumbered as they were with the struggling body of Nicolò, who fought valiantly.

Just as the mass of dark bodies hit the door to the outside, Yusuf hit the mass of bodies, throwing himself against them in a surprisingly vain attempt at undoing any of their holds on Nicolò, held supine between them and writhing like a worm in their arms. Yusuf saw a quick flash of his face, his mouth gagged with a strip of fabric, his eyes wild, before one of the men grabbed Yusuf’s tunic by the shoulders and dragged him.

Yusuf’s bare feet scrabbled on the rough wood of the hallway as he tried to stop the momentum, but he was dragged all the same, out the door to the top landing of the external staircase, looking out at the small plot of garden and yard inside the brewery’s fence, and he was being lifted, and his hands grabbed for the railing but missed as his center of gravity tipped, his shins knocking painfully on it instead, and his world was upside-down, and—

The fall was short, the crack was lightning, and the darkness was bleak.

He returned, groaning. How long…

He went to his hands and knees, swaying. There were people on the stairs, moving towards him, and several languages were being shouted in the air like the chorus of a tragedy. Dogs were barking from the yards of the establishments close by.

“Are you all right? How are you not dead?”

Impeccable Arabic, though accented, non-native. Yusuf shoved the helper away from him, stumbling like he was drunk. “Nicolò!” he shouted, through a sore neck that was newly whole.

He gave chase down the little alley that led to the main road. If he had come back in time, they would still be close by. He whirled around to the figure in the yard who had come to help him, a young woman in a wrapped shawl.

“Which way did they go?” he demanded, making her flinch with his desperation.

“Towards the sea,” she said, pointing southwest. “But you shouldn’t—”

To hell with what he should or should not do. Yusuf ran like a participant in a race, moving athletically with the endurance he had built up over the month of travel and playfighting with Nicolò. Constantinople was huge, the biggest city he had ever been in, but they were staying in a neighborhood near the border of land and sea, where the merchant ships rocked peacefully on the tides. It wouldn’t take him very long to get there, and if Nicolò gave them as much trouble as he’d been giving them in the inn, he may buy himself just enough time before they could get him hidden away on one of any of the thousands of ships in the harbor.

“Wait!”

Yusuf did not stop or acknowledge the voice, but he did take a moment to be deeply annoyed at the woman who owned it, the young lady in the shawl and patchwork skirt. He could hear the slapping footsteps of her pursuit behind him. She was fast; she had caught up to him, even with the seconds of his head start.

“Those were Genovesi—” she panted.

“I know.”

“Why do you want to go after them?”

“They have my friend.”

Confused, shocked, or frightened into silence, the young woman – more a girl, in actuality, now that he could see the youth in the curve of her cheek – did not reply to this. But she also did not let up, matching his pace to run beside him all the way to the shipyards.

“Nicolò!” Yusuf called, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“Shut up!” echoed a voice back at him, muffled by distance and the walls of the sleeper’s shelter.

“Why are you friends with a Genovese?” the girl asked, her hands bracing on her hips as she caught her breath.

“It’s a long story,” Yusuf said, exasperated, as he turned on his dirtied feet, looking this way and that. They were at the waterline, the ground-level retaining wall at their feet holding back the gentle force of the nighttime sea. The moon above them, barely a sliver of a waning crescent, was offering no help tonight. “Where did they go?” he breathed to himself, straining his ears. Then he went off down the line of the harbor, felt a twinge of fear that he was going in the wrong direction, and doubled back on himself, ending up back at the girl’s side, who hadn’t moved.

“You landed on your head, you know,” she said, her dark eyes tracking him as he paced in his agitation.

“Mm-hmm,” he said, not listening.

“You were dead.”

Yusuf faced her. “Obviously not. Go back to the inn to your parents.”

She flashed a grin that was nine-tenths a snarl and did not reply.

Yusuf’s perked ears caught something: a called order, like that of a ship captain or a legion commander. He took off in its direction, stalking low with his body halved at the waist, in case the men who had kidnapped Nicolò had a man standing guard to look for a pursuit.

He found the ship they were loading easily, once he followed the sounds of their preparations. Crouched behind the shape of a smaller ship beside the one he was targeting, he recognized the man who Nicolò had called a friend, Giuseppe. The Genovese swine was barking orders from the pier, confident that they had killed him and could make off with their cargo unhindered.

“Who are they?”

Yusuf jumped and nearly swore. The girl was beside him, crouched in the space beneath his arm. She moved like a cat in the dark.

“I don’t know. Go away.”

“I can help.”

“Go away.”

The men had already loaded Nicolò; he could not see his friend on the deck of the Genovese galley. The men were doing other preparations for sailing, loading crated cargo from a cart on the shoreline and preparing the sails.

“Shit,” Yusuf whispered under his breath.

“I checked your heartbeat.”

He rounded on the girl, snarling in a harsh whisper. “Do you want me to make you leave?”

The girl straightened from her crouch beneath him and walked away huffily.

Good riddance. Yusuf deliberated for a moment, observing the pattern of movement of the kidnappers. Including Giuseppe, there were seven men. Too many to kill? Probably, until he could free Nicolò and have him standing at his back. They would be without weapons, though—

A scream blasted up from the street along the shoreline of the harbor.

“Help me! Oh, help me!”

Slack-jawed, Yusuf could only watch from his hiding place as the girl rushed at the ship’s crew from her starting place between two buildings on the street level, her shawl and hair askew. She was speaking in Arabic, which the Genovesi would not be able to understand, but the meaning was clear enough. She wiped her face with the corner of her shawl and came to a stop close to the ship they were loading… and yet just far enough that the men had had to disembark back onto the pier to approach her, rapidly interrogating in Ligurian.

Smart, stupid girl. Hoping the Genovesi had more honor directed at innocent women than at men who had been minding their own business, Yusuf sprang up and crouch-walked along the pier to the deck of the galley, climbing the rickety ramp they had set up for loading their crates in two-man carries. He vaulted the gunwale and hissed, “Nicolò!” through his teeth, still keeping low in case one of the men turned to look back.

“Mm!”

“Shh!” he admonished quickly, following the sound of a call muffled by a fabric gag. He went belowdecks and saw the open cargo area stacked with boxes of merchandise. Behind one stack, tied with rope around his chest to the pillar of the mainsail, Nicolò struggled with his bonds, holding up his tied wrists to him.

“I don’t have my knife,” Yusuf said, frustrated. He had to undo the knots by hand, but first he pulled the gag.

“Giuseppe,” Nicolò said, fury kindling in his pale eyes. He had a small cut on his forehead, or the remnants of one, with a thin trickle of blood going down his temple.

“I know,” Yusuf said. “Want to kill him?”

‘Kill’ was their only shared word in that question. As Yusuf got the ropes around his wrists untied and unraveled and went around the back of the column to finagle the ropes around his chest, he heard, “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Yusuf demanded. “He tried to kidnap you! He killed me!”

“No. Friend.”

“ _Foe_ ,” Yusuf spat in Genovese Ligurian, disgusted that he was beginning to share language with the men who had done this.

“Yusuf.”

He huffed on a petulant sigh, nodding. “Fine. Escape, then. But I’m killing any who come after us again.”

They went back abovedecks, checking the sightline of the harbor. The men were trying to calm down the girl, who had devolved to hysterical tears.

“Who?” Nicolò whispered beside him.

“I have no idea. Let’s go.”

They disembarked and went back the way Yusuf had come, practically crawling on their hands and knees. They were lucky now, for the almost new moon above them. Like two shadows, they crossed the wide street that effaced the shoreline of the harbor, their silhouettes probably more akin to roaming street dogs than to two men.

At the corner to the street, Yusuf put two fingers into his mouth and whistled.

The girl, savvy as she was, knew it was a signal for her. At once, she turned on her heel and bolted, the men calling stupidly back for her.

They would have only minutes before the deception was discovered. Yusuf led Nicolò back to the inn and was not surprised when the girl melted into formation beside them, keeping pace once again. Nicolò made a move to attack, or at least to push away, but Yusuf stayed his hand with a helpless shrug.

“So you got him,” the girl said, giving Nicolò a critical once-over.

“Yes. Thank you for your help.”

“Easy,” she grinned.

In moments, they were back at the inn’s yard. It had mostly cleared of the onlookers who had come at the commotion of earlier; it was late, and sleep was too precious to waste looking for troublemakers in the empty dark. One old man was standing on the balcony of an adjacent building, leaving heavily on the rail and watching them as motionlessly as a statue, save for the cup he was periodically bringing to his lips for a drink.

“ _Swords and packs_ ,” Yusuf said to Nicolò, who nodded and went up the stairs.

They would have to change rooms in the middle of the night, abandoning the inn which had been a pleasant home for them for several days. A pity, but not worth crying or dying over. Yusuf turned to the girl, who was looking younger by the second, a smudge of dirt on her cheek. Her hair, mussed intentionally for the deception at the shipyard, had not been smoothed.

“You were dead,” she said to him, back to that curious but matter-of-fact certainty.

“You were mistaken.”

“I know what dead looks like,” she said, shaking her head.

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“You can tell me, it’s okay.”

“Tell you what?” Yusuf asked, laughing over his unease. “That I came back from the dead?”

“Did you?”

For a brief, impossible moment, he considered telling the truth. The secret they were carrying was truly that, a secret, and it weighed on him. Having Nicolò around made it slightly easier, but the burden was still there.

And would be on her, too, if he admitted to it. “No,” he said, letting her down from whatever fantastical story she had concocted in her head, whatever adventure she thought she might be having tonight. “I was unconscious. No one can come back from the dead.”

Her gaze burned into his. “I don’t believe you. I know what I saw.”

“What’s your name?” he asked, sighing, playing into the beleaguered role of adult to her still-a-child. She carried herself like she was much older, especially when she was standing still, like she was posing with her shawl and her patchwork skirt, but he saw through it.

“Esen.”

“Esen, I don’t think you should stay here. The Genovesi will be coming back here to look for us, and they will certainly recognize you.”

“I can make myself look very different if I have to.”

“Don’t joke,” he said, hardening his voice. “It’s dangerous.”

She stepped close, putting her hands flat on his chest, startling him to dumbfounded silence for the second time in ten minutes. When she came forward, her lips on his were soft and practiced.

“Don’t,” he said, finding himself, pushing her shoulders away gently.

“You don’t want it?” Her lower body was still pressed to his, her hands cupping the back of his upper arms.

“It’s not the time or place.”

Footsteps announced Nicolò’s return down the stairs. Yusuf turned his head to him, pushing Esen further. Nicolò had their things packed up, their bags slung across his shoulders. He was standing very still.

“Do you promise that you’ll leave?” Yusuf asked Esen, going back to her, his cheeks hot.

She was standing heavily on one leg, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Fine,” she said, shaking her head, like it was all an inconvenience.

“Thank you. Please take care of yourself.” Yusuf sidestepped away, feeling foolishly like he didn’t want to turn his back on her, holding his hand out to Nicolò for his pack. When it was handed over and hanging off his shoulder, he acknowledged her one last time. “You helped me and him, back there. Thank you for that. Don’t waste your kind heart.”

She did not reply. Yusuf finally turned, nodded once at Nicolò, who peered at him with concern, and followed his friend through the night-dark city.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Giuseppe is the Italian version of Joseph, like Arabic's Yusuf. It is pronounced joo-ZEP-eh, the nickname-y diminutive joo-zep-POO-cho.
> 
> I pictured Esen as being around fifteen years old. Her name is of Turkish origin, pronounced ess-EN.


	5. Day One Hundred Eighteen

☽

“What’s that?” Nicolò settled onto his knees and placed the basket of food on the sand, leaning his head over Yusuf’s shoulder to catch a better glimpse.

“Nothing,” Yusuf said, angling away, but Nicolò’s eyes were sharp, and he’d seen even before speaking.

“Are you drawing?”

“No.”

Nicolò raised his brows at the sudden shyness, his hands out and already sorting through the fruits and vegetables he’d gotten from the marketplace. “You can say if you are.”

“I’m not.” The parchment whispered softly as Yusuf rolled it up, but Nicolò now saw the charcoal stains, his fingers capped in black like they had been dipped into ink or indigo dye.

“What are you drawing?”

“What did you get from the market?”

Nicolò hid his exasperation behind a tiny, agreeable smile. “Leeks, onions, apples. I also got a pomegranate.” He held it out like a treasure, cupped in both hands. When Yusuf reached for it, Nicolò caught his wrist, holding tight while he turned the hand over, as if to show Yusuf the stained fingers for himself. Yusuf grunted and tugged it away, taking the pomegranate as a payment for Nicolò’s trickery.

They were just outside Athens. It was _novénbre_ , and also what Yusuf’s people called _Dhu al-Hijjah_ , and while it was not exactly frigid, Nicolò found himself almost missing the suppressive heat of summer and early autumn. They had stayed in Constantinople for several more weeks after the kidnapping attempt, until the itch to move on had infected them both, seemingly simultaneously. They had boarded another boat, this one bound for Athens, the ancient city Nicolò had always wanted to see. While this city was not as grossly metropolitan as the previous, it had been just as good a home.

They had improved their conversational skills enormously over the past twelve weeks, what with the constant immersion and a slightly desperate color to the need for communication. It had gotten to the point where one or both could venture out and speak gaily with a shopkeeper or a tradesman in the street in their acquired language, recovering smoothly from any stumbles with a polite explanation that they were practicing. They had even gotten bold enough to begin a little Greek; both had had a taste of it through their lives, Yusuf from his trading, Nicolò from academic studies, but neither had grasped it well enough to even want to try speaking aloud. Now, though, they were positively polylingual, sharing something as fascinating as the study of languages in the giddy way of schoolboys.

They were sharing more of themselves, as well. Nicolò had begun challenging Yusuf to games, dice or checkers or tabula, spending long hours into the night competing against the gentle indulgence of Yusuf’s participation. Yusuf had taught him in return how to whistle and coached him through hilarious, misguided attempts at singing. They’d both attempted to read and write the other’s language, though this was much, much harder to exchange than speaking, being that neither had any knowledge how to properly tutor someone through literacy. The vellum and parchment they had acquired for these exercises had obviously not gone to waste, Nicolò saw now, but he was surprised by Yusuf’s privacy over it. He didn’t hide much.

“Are you not going to show me?” Nicolò asked.

“There’s nothing to show.”

“I can be the judge of that.”

Yusuf turned his head, asking for clarity on the vocabulary word he did not know.

“The one who decides.”

“Decide nothing, because there is nothing.” He cracked the already-scored pomegranate with his bare hands, his charcoal-tipped fingers suddenly running red with juice.

“You’ll stain your papers,” Nicolò said, reaching for them where they were rolled and stacked beneath Yusuf’s bent legs. They were alone on a beach just below a rocky face, north of the harbor where Grecian dromons bobbed at peacetime rest.

“Don’t—”

Nicolò unfurled the first, rolled as it was into a scroll-shape. The frontside was littered with his own shaky attempts at the Maghrebian abjadi of Yusuf’s learning, but the backside was full of its own wonders. Hands, fingers, curls of palm or fingertip, feather-soft and jagged with short, swift strokes.

“Oh, they’re beautiful,” Nicolò said softly, moving his gaze over the paper in enchantment that did not have to be feigned.

“Don’t tease.”

“I’m not teasing! You could illuminate for a living.”

Yusuf scoffed. “Those monks couldn’t draw a dog from a donkey’s ass.” He undid the final split of the fruit in his hands with a visceral sound, the spray from the popping seeds quivering on the sand like blood. He held out one of the halves, but Nicolò’s hands were full of more of the papers, exploring the wonders of the charcoal sketches.

“You are a very good artist. Are these from life?”

“You mean did I draw as I looked at my own hand?”

“Yes.”

“Some of them.” Yusuf’s head was turned, not looking at the soft rolls of parchment that he had filled with the wonders of his art. Nicolò was surprised at his self-consciousness; in all the months that they had been together, he hadn’t often known him to be awkward or embarrassed, especially by a skill that, to Nicolò’s untrained knowledge, seemed very well honed indeed.

“Not all?”

“Some were from memory.”

He saw it now. There were two sets of hands, two very different sets of poses: one was slightly more stiff, the hands contorted and posed, practice for shape and shading rather than believability. The other set was softer, held in natural rest or movement, holding a stylus or cupping a piece of fruit.

When Nicolò raised his gaze from the parchments, Yusuf was still holding out the pomegranate half, his eyes downcast. Slowly, Nicolò rolled the papers back into their scrolls, handling them carefully and stacking them beside him on the sand. Then he reached out for the fruit, letting Yusuf tip it into his palm. Their fingers touched, the briefest of contacts, as the pomegranate came to rest heavily and sweetly in his hand.

Nicolò nodded his thanks, his cheeks suddenly aflame. He couldn’t help the thought that came to him next, unbidden and unable to be suppressed, hoping that this would be the next scene that he sketched, the brief touch of their fingers immortalized in charcoal and parchment. A thing to be remembered, and seen.

☉

Yusuf grunted, turning over in the bed. It was later that afternoon, after the shared pomegranate and the reveal of his art. They had split up again, as they did often nowadays as their confidences and their trust had grown; Yusuf had gone back to their rented room, nursing a headache that he wanted to soothe with tea and rest. Nicolò had left for the streets of the city, where he liked to walk and watch, his hands clasped behind his back. His heavy eyelids and demure posture allowed him a bit of pleasant invisibility on the street, and Yusuf had seen firsthand how he seemed to melt into the ambience of a busy road, the gazes of the passersby sliding off and around him like he was something slippery. They didn’t look closely enough at him to see the real Nicolò, the strength and the kindness—

Yusuf made another throaty noise of discomfort. It was hot in the room, even in the mild cold of a Mediterranean winter. His tea long drunk, he’d slipped under the blanket of their bed for a nap, but he’d tossed and turned since then. He was antsy, he knew, and it would just be better to get up and walk around, but he’d wanted the privacy of their room.

His hand had slipped beneath the blanket and was now resting on the divot between abdomen and thigh. There was sin in this, what he wanted to do, but more than that, there was danger. There was no reason he could justify, no action he could take that would make it any less of the point of no return. But he ached, and his skin burned, and his belly tingled, and he couldn’t stop thinking of it.

The door to their room opened, and Yusuf shot up in bed. “What is it?” he asked, looking immediately for the danger, looking for clues that he’d been caught.

But Nicolò had simply returned with more food, a bundle of pita wrapped in a handkerchief. He brought the smells of the outside, the sea and baking, into the stale air of the room. “How is your head?” he asked, in a respectfully low tone, setting down the bundle and going to the one window of the rented quarters. This one, unlike their various homes in Constantinople, looked directly out onto the water, and when the wooden shutter was open, the sighing of the waves soothed and filled them.

“Better,” Yusuf said, lying as the pain doubled. “It’s a shame we still experience sickness.”

“I’m actually glad,” Nicolò said mildly, sitting in the single spindly chair of their quarters to remove his boots. He massaged at the balls of his feet when they were off, and Yusuf had to look away. “It’s a reminder we are still human. Hunger, thirst, weakness, fever, these all bring variety. Otherwise I should think our lives would get very boring.”

Maybe he had a fever. Maybe that was the burning he was feeling. He put the back of his hand up against his sweaty forehead, still sitting in the bed with the blanket bunched around his hips.

“Are you sick?”

“No,” he said, letting his hand drop into his lap.

Nicolò came forward, sitting sideways on the edge of the bed and twisting, his hand out to touch. “Let me feel,” he said, when Yusuf flinched away. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Yusuf allowed it, but the brush of Nicolò’s fingers brought the rise of heat to his skin, so much that he flinched away again, hissing.

“What is it?”

Too kind for the horrors this world had brought unto him. “I think I need to go for a walk.”

“I’ll come with you.” And his friend made to stand, about to replace the boots onto his sore feet.

“No.”

Nicolò turned, looking for the cause, for whatever wrong he’d committed. “No?”

“I want to be alone.”

There was silence for a long moment, as Yusuf sat still in the bed, not making a move to vacate it. They still shared, as two bachelors in a cheap room did, as unmarried men who had less coins to their name than dreams. It was not unusual, it was not immoral, and Yusuf hadn’t thought twice of it in the first few months.

“All right,” Nicolò said slowly. He was wondering about it, wanting to know how to fix it, but he wouldn’t try, if that’s not what Yusuf wanted.

“I think we should go our separate ways.”

Yusuf said it before he felt the words in his throat, like he’d vomited from the illness he was carrying. He looked up as they escaped from him, seeing the very moment Nicolò heard and registered them.

The other man, sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand placed flat on the blanket between them, did not do more than blink, though his pale eyes were frantic, taking in Yusuf’s face, his forehead, his lips, his eyes, his throat. “Why?” he asked, with the stillness of a rabbit the fox has scented. Hiding in the grass, waiting for the moment of the break.

“What else is there to do?” Yusuf said, pleading now. “We can’t die. We have nothing. Your parents, my mother, they can’t have us back. In their minds we are dead, word has surely reached them both by now. Lost in Jerusalem, bodies burned. We have no livelihoods, nothing to show for our time on Earth. No more friends, in case they learn our secret. No lovers, no—We have nothing.” Yusuf choked on the word like bile, again as unwanted as the declaration.

They had spoken about this, all of it. Almost all of it. Long nights had been spent in serious debate over candlelight: they couldn’t return to their families. They couldn’t make names for themselves. Only base survival was left to them, which wasn’t their choice anyway. The only thing they had skirted around, or mentioned in passing without delving too deep, was romance. Love. Sex.

“We have each other,” Nicolò murmured.

Yusuf choked, pushed up out of the bed, and left the room, barefoot and stomping.

☽

Nicolò followed, disobeying Yusuf’s wishes for once. “Wait!” he called, seeing the other tenants of the lets around them, the hustle of the city as pure and human as the war they had fought on opposite sides. From one extreme to the other, from warfare to society, and back again.

“Yusuf, stop!”

He stopped when they were on the beach again. It was mid-afternoon, the sun low in the winter sky. They were alone, the ocean waves and wet sand underfoot unpleasantly cold.

“Yusuf, I don’t understand—”

“We don’t have each other, Nicolò. We are enemies.”

Stung, poisoned by this, Nicolò reached out for the other man’s shoulder and spun him around forcefully. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m a Muslim! You’re a Christian! We can’t continue like this. It’s already happened once. Your Ligurian friend saw us together and thought it was so strange they kidnapped you to take you away from me. They threw me off a stairwell and broke my neck because they thought I was a Saracen dog.”

“And I went back with you! I chose to go back with _you_!”

“For what?” Yusuf asked, slapping the arm on his shoulder away. His cheeks were aflame. Definitely fevered, possibly mad from it. Nicolò wondered how much of it was the illness and how much of it was bottled thoughts, as bad as when they had been thinking them and couldn’t properly explain. They had been soothed since those first weeks, when now they could point and ask to be handed that shirt over there and it would be done. Now it was easier, and their camaraderie more sincere. He had thought.

“For… I don’t know! For companionship! For trust! We’re no longer Muslim and Christian, Yusuf, our circumstances led to that. You don’t believe any more than I do. Not anymore.”

“So what else is there?” Yusuf asked, a desperate cling to his voice. His eyes were bright from the fever and from near-tears, and Nicolò desperately wanted to reach out and hold him, the first time he’d ever thought it so concretely before. He wanted to soothe, and to whisper, and to rub at skin and hair until Yusuf felt better. Like a parent, or a brother. “What is there in the world worth being here for? If not to love God, if not to prevent damnation, if not to grow old and embrace death as an old friend, after a single lifetime of living, then what?”

“For wonders,” Nicolò declared, so forcefully and suddenly that it surprised even himself. “For experiences. For seeing the world and bringing good where there is none. I’ve spoken before of Jerusalem. I’ve said before how much I hate myself for being there. But my being there brought us together, and believe me when I say it, but nothing in this world has been worth it to me like having you. I would stop the siege a thousand times over, if I could, to prevent that suffering. But each one of those times, I would hesitate, just for a moment, because it would mean that you and I wouldn’t meet, and you and I wouldn’t kill each other, and we wouldn’t be immortal together. And I would hate knowing that I missed my chance in meeting you and being stuck in this hellish nightmare of eternity with you.”

Yusuf breathed through his slightly-parted lips, taking in every word, even as tears went down his cheeks and disappeared into his beard. He shook his head, wiping at them.

“You don’t have to feel the same way—” Nicolò began.

“I do,” Yusuf said, sobbing on it. “I do. I hate it, but I do.”

“If we have to be immortal, and we have to lose everything, at least we get to do it together.”

Yusuf sank down to his knees.

“Here now,” Nicolò said. “Back to bed.” He bent and lifted the other man, supporting his weight. From here, with him in his arms, he could feel the burn of fever, and the shaky twitching of his skin. “You’re lucky, you know. Any other man taken in by this would probably be dead by now.”

Yusuf chuckled weakly. “Are you going to let me pretend all of this was from the fever?”

“If you need it to be so, then of course.”

They went back up the sea stairs, ancient steps of stone and embedded shells, to the street-level, where shoppers shrank from them, the illness coming off Yusuf like the stink of mud. Their rented room was set back from the street, stacked two high and two deep in a whitewashed villa, and Nicolò navigated them back to it, encouraging Yusuf when he faltered.

“You’re very sick,” Nicolò said. “You should have said something this morning.”

“I didn’t think… I thought it was something else…” Yusuf slid back into the bed, shivering. His skin was layered with sweat, and his eyes were bloodshot. Nicolò dipped the handkerchief that had been wrapped around the pita bread into their jug of water on the table in the corner, sponging at the sheen on Yusuf’s forehead and cheeks, then around to the back of his neck and down his bare arms.

“Nicolò?”

“Yes?”

They had been speaking in Arabic since he’d first entered their room, but Yusuf switched to Ligurian now, as easily as breathing. “Do you really think new experiences will make immortality worth it?”

“Of course, my friend. Think of what we get to see. Think of how much the world will change in the next thousand years.”

☉

The moon was up. Yusuf woke and saw it, hanging framed in the window like it was painted there. Nicolò hadn’t closed the shutters when he’d gone to bed, and the room was pleasantly cool now, a change that made sleeping with soft blankets and a body beside to warm them all the more preferable.

His fever was gone. He remembered the entirety of the day, starting from the beach and the pomegranate, all the way to the renewed declaration of partnership after his own misstep, but it all felt like a dream, like he was trying to reach for the memories through a gurgling stream. He was ashamed of himself for saying what he’d said; the hurt he’d seen in Nicolò’s face wasn’t easily forgiven. And he hadn’t truly meant it, not really. He’d never have willingly parted from Nicolò’s side if the other man still wanted him there.

The fear, and the results of which that had made him say what he’d said, came from the fact that these feelings were very real and not just kept to themselves now. They had each said, and meant, that they didn’t want to leave the other. They would chose each other again and again, over anyone else, over any _thing_ else, and for now, Yusuf was content with that.

But would he be content with that forever? Would Nicolò?

Yusuf slithered out from the blanket, bracing his arm on the wall as he angled his leg over the sleeping form of the man beside him. Ever since that first bed in Constantinople, they had slept like this: the bed pushed up against the wall opposite the door; Yusuf on the side against the wall; Nicolò on the open side. They had taken to rearranging the furniture of their rented rooms, much to the chagrin of their various landlords, but since they paid good money and didn’t break anything, they were left to do as they would.

He got his footing beneath him and went to the window, staring out at the sea. Somewhere out there was his home, and Nicolò’s home, and the two women from their dreams, too, they were both sure of it. He braced his elbows on the sill, feeling the cool touch of the winter air. The ocean, tens of meters below, breathed its breaths.

He loved Nicolò. The word, thought for the first time in all its glory, clawed him, much like the bite of the blades against his skin that he had known since that day in Jerusalem, though this was even more painful, even more deadly. There would be nothing for him at the end of this knife. There would be no gasping revival, no knitting of the skin that had been rent by its sharpness. Therefore, he would not wield it.

It was enough to know that Nicolò loved him too, in his way. It was enough to know that Nicolò cared enough to hold a cup of water against his mouth, to wipe at sweat and blood and the vomit of sickness – Yusuf had thrown up once, later, and felt immediately better for it – and it was enough to know that Yusuf’s love, his drawings of Nicolò’s hands and in the yearning ache in his groin for a touch that he wouldn’t allow, would be sustained by the light reflected in Nicolò’s eyes when he teased.

“Yusuf?”

He looked over his shoulder back at the bed, where Nicolò had raised his head from the pillow, blinking blearily at him in the moonlight.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Yusuf said. “Just thinking.”

“Well, think in bed. It’s cold, and we have to haul that delivery for the cooper tomorrow.”

Yusuf grinned and returned, stepping one long motion over Nicolò back to his side of the bed. Nicolò scooted slightly, giving him room, and then returned to his warm spot, facing out at the room, as he always did when Yusuf was there beside him. Yusuf, in turn, faced his friend’s back. He had slept with his younger brother like this when they were children, and he remembered the mornings after the coldest nights, when their mother would find them wrapped together, sometimes lying in funny, jagged lines across one another, sometimes snuggled so tight she had to pry their arms from around each other.

The two of them would never sleep like that, but this was enough. To know that the other man was there, within reaching distance if Yusuf ever needed him, was enough.


	6. Day One Hundred Eighty-four

☽

The cart beneath them rattled on the unmaintained road. If there was one thing Nicolò held for the Romans of a thousand years ago, they had kept excellent roads.

They had been conscripted by their busybody landlord, who called them “two fine young men” and “you look like good fighters, eh?” and “go before I sic Toothy at you”. So Nicolò and Yusuf had trudged wearily to the merchant with the one blind eye, their landlord’s jowly mutt Toothy grinning at them from the doorway of their let room.

From that merchant, they had journeyed over land – their longest trip since Attalea – all the way north to Thessaloniki, taking eight whole days to bring the goods the merchant had needed delivered in moisture-warped crates and rattling woven baskets. They were grateful for the convenience of the cart and the horses, even over the rocky, hilly landscape, and they had named the horses Greyhide and Grump, after their most visible characteristics.

In Thessaloniki, however, as they were unloading the cart and anticipating a more relaxed ride back, where they would be greeted by a gruff but grateful landlord and a rented room with a severe discount, the merchant contact who Blind Eye had sent them to begged of them a favor: another long ride, this one all the way into Kutmichevitsa to the west. Neither man spoke anything close to Slavonic, neither man had any experience traipsing through the Bulgarian-Byzantine borders that had very recently been under as bloody an uprising as the war through the holy land, and neither man particularly wanted to do it, but the merchant had paid well, thanking them for their time. So it appeared that, between the nobleman and the cloth trader, they were now delivery boys.

Greyhide and Grump plowed along, their heads low with meditative relaxation. It was still winter, but it had been a mild one, and the sun was shining with few clouds above. Nicolò was near-dozing, so the touch on his forearm made him jump and swear.

“Peace,” chuckled Yusuf. “I said stop.”

Nicolò reined the horses back, looking around. They were taking a narrow valley path along a blue-green river, a mild scrub forest surrounding the inclines around and above them. There were snow-capped mountains in the high distance, shivering off a layer of ice and frost, but down here in the lower lands it was comfortable. “What is it?”

“I want a swim.”

Nicolò turned his head in an exaggeratedly-slow motion, his incredulity honed and bared. “You can’t be serious.”

“Deeply, _αγάπη μου_.” Yusuf had already jumped down from the cart, lifting the hem of his shirt over his head. “And, to be perfectly frank, you should think about it yourself.”

“I don’t need to swim.”

“To swim, no, but to wash…?” Yusuf grinned at him and went to the water’s edge, having folded and placed his tunic and trousers on the back of the cart. Clad in only his underthings, he waded into the river, and even his desire for the water couldn’t suppress the shocked yelp from the sting of cold.

“I don’t need to wash,” Nicolò said grumpily. “I did so in Thessaloniki.”

“Four days ago, _habibi_. I’m sitting right next to you.” Yusuf stood for a moment, the current swirling around his calves, before he wiggled out of his underthings, tossing them to the shore. Then he ducked fully into the shallows and came up gasping, shaking out his hair. “The water’s g-great!”

Nicolò’s pride was wounded. He wasn’t fussy, but he didn’t want to subject Yusuf to the offence of body odor if he himself wasn’t also giving it off. They were men who had lived among and around other men all their lives, and giving off a stink was as normal as breathing. But if Yusuf was doing it…

He climbed down from the front seat of the cart, battle-weary. “I’ll bet the one thing we can die from is freezing,” he called, purposefully gloomy, eyeing the jewel-colored river with distaste. But he undressed too, leaving his clothes folded beside Yusuf’s. Fully naked, exposed to the winter air that prickled the skin on his thighs, he hobbled over the smooth-rock shore, putting his toes in and growling at the temperature.

Yusuf was working his way down the incline out of the shallows, his arms held tight against his chest as he stepped resolutely. The waterline was now around his middle, and he was visibly shivering. It seemed to Nicolò that he was quite regretting his spur-of-the-moment decision, but he’d gone too far to back down now. “The water’s w-warmer once you’re in,” he said, fighting the stutter, the muscles of his bare back tense.

“Let’s see it.”

Yusuf turned, throwing Nicolò a sly, cocky glance, rising to the challenge. He made an exaggerated show of taking a deep breath, then he went down beneath the surface.

Nicolò rolled his eyes and waited for him to surface, prepared to give Yusuf the victory. And he waited. And waited.

“Yusuf.”

He took a step in. The current was not strong, more of a brook than a river, but it was deep, the water darkening from yellow-green at the shore to a deep teal in only a few meters. He could not see Yusuf’s body, so he kept his gaze fixed where he had disappeared.

“Yusuf!”

Nicolò wasted no more time; he splashed into the river like a charging hound, his searching arms beneath the surface and sweeping the depths. He found smooth, bare skin fast, quicker than he’d been expecting, and he yanked at it, his nails scrabbling until he could get a good grip.

Yusuf was hauled back up, and he came laughing, shaking out the water from his long curls, wiping at his eyes to squint in Nicolò’s direction. “See, you’re in now!”

Nicolò shoved him backwards, making him slip on the slimy stones underfoot. “Bastard,” he snapped, holding his arms against his chest as he shivered, from more than the cold. They were standing with the water at chest-level, and it was hard to breathe.

“I’m sorry,” Yusuf said, still smiling, but he meant the apology. “I thought it would get you in faster.”

“It did. Can we make a deal? We don’t play dead again, not ever.”

“You’re right,” Yusuf said immediately, the smile gone instantly. “I’m sorry, that was unkind. Please forgive me.”

“You’re forgiven. If you sing for me later.”

“Deal struck.”

They shook on it. Then they had no choice but to swim, now that they were in, floating lazily on the current and then powering through long strokes to get back to where their horses were watching from the road just off the riverbank. Nicolò stepped out to unhook them from their harnesses, murmuring apologies that they hadn’t freed them before, and patted their sides as the two stepped gratefully to patches of grass and weed beside the hard-packed valley road. When Nicolò returned to the water, even the brief respite of the sun had rewarmed his skin to the point that getting back in the water was more tortuous than the first time. He had to grit his teeth and let Yusuf call encouragingly from the opposite bank, to where he’d swum with an easy stroke.

They splashed each other and raced and dove, worked their fingernails down to their scalps to scrub the clean, snowmelt water through their hair, and played more vocabulary games, one calling a word in Arabic or Ligurian and challenging the other to match it in Greek. They played “What am I?”, describing an object and forcing the other to guess its name. They swam as fast as they could from one bank to the other and then back again, their lungs heaving for air when they were finished. It was true that they got used to the cold as time went on, but it was still tough, hauling through the river that had certainly been ice only days before, high up in the mountains. It remembered its origins.

Nicolò was a slightly faster swimmer, but Yusuf could hold his breath for longer. Both had been raised in a port city, the Mediterranean lapping at the stones of their cities’ foundations. They challenged and played, laughing at the other’s prowess, congratulating each other at victories. They were equally competitive, it seemed, but at different things, so triumphs and losses were split equally and not dwelled upon.

Later, Nicolò wandered downstream, letting himself be carried by the current and watching the foliage on the riverbanks. The place they had stopped was perfect for the swim, with a gently-sloping beach leading straight from the road to the river. Other places did not boast as good a landscape, with heavy brush hanging directly over the water, or too many rocks blocking the view from the road they had taken. Yusuf had probably been keeping an eye out for several miles, waiting for the best place to pull the horses to a stop.

Nicolò finally turned and swam back, his teeth chattering. “I’m ready to move on,” he said, raising his voice as he came around the final curve of the river back to their momentary campsite. The horses were still grazing, their tails flicking, and the cart was where they’d left it, but there was no sign of Yusuf. He’d been scrubbing their clothes at the riverbank when Nicolò had floated away, kneeling like a washerwoman as he pounded the fabrics with a rock from the shore.

“Yusuf?” Nicolò got his footing beneath him on the rocks, rising into the crisp air with droplets sluicing down his bare skin. “You promised no more—”

Men, strangers, came around from the other side of their cart, dragging Yusuf between them. More bandits followed, converging. Six total, an entire troop. They were dressed in Slavic-style clothes, heavier than the loose linens and cloths of the Byzantines, and were bearded and booted and grim. Yusuf, between the two in the lead, had his arms held behind him, looking vulnerable and strangely small, as naked as he’d left him. He had injuries on his face, probably already healed, but the blood remained. One of the men held a wicked dagger to his throat, pushed in enough to curve the flesh.

Nicolò put his hands out, low and placating. “Take what you want and go,” he said.

One of the men who was not controlling Yusuf stepped forward, taking charge. He said something in their guttural language, beckoning Nicolò forward with a gruff gesture.

“Let my friend go first,” Nicolò said, shaking his head. Then he switched to Arabic, repeating it there, and lastly in Greek, halting and less fluent.

He and the bandits shared no language. Recognizing the futility of negotiation, the men rushed him, their swords drawn, their voices rough. They thought the two naked, weaponless men were easy targets.

Nicolò feinted, first going to the left, then lunging in a true move to the right, ducking under the sweep of the arm of the nearest man, though his sword scraped his back, slicing a thin streak across his ribs. He bit down a groan, going for Yusuf, who was struggling equally passionately, trying to rip his arms from the grips of the men flanking him. He got a punch buried deep into his abdomen for his troubles, the knife knocked away, and he doubled over, taking the entirety of his weight off his feet and onto the arms of the men holding him. They shuffled, unbalanced, perfect for Nicolò who rammed a shoulder into the nearer of the two, bringing the entire scrum down onto the large pebbles and stones of the ground.

“Behind you!” Yusuf shouted, rolling, his arms free.

Nicolò dodged miraculously, the residual wound on his back stinging from the twisting movements, and disarmed the sword with a flourish that even he admired from a distance. When he turned, brandishing the Bulgarian sword, the other men leered at him. One said something in the unmistakable swagger of six-against-one, or two as Yusuf stood.

The ambushed pair retreated slowly, their backs angled against each other, facing slightly out at the rest of the men. In a disconnect, in a swoop of his belly, Nicolò realized this was the first time their bare skin brushed bare skin, their shoulders and ribs and the side swells of their rears touching with the intimacy of battle – not of love. How fitting, how tragic. Yusuf had been using pet names for him, _my love, my heart, my friend_ , in different languages, and it meant nothing more than this: two warriors, standing back-to-back in battle, ready to kill.

“What do you think?” Nicolò muttered.

“I think these are six dead men,” Yusuf said, his voice monotonous. They hadn’t had to kill in a very long time.

Nicolò sighed. Nodded. Charged.

☉

Weaponless, Yusuf had to rush backwards to the cart, going for Ammar’s knife, while Nicolò went up against six of them. There would be death for them here, surely. It was different, now, charging into battle with the absolute certainty that you would survive it. Maybe they would die once or twice, maybe they would choke to death on their own blood or drop senseless to the ground as their hearts or brains were skewered, but they would get up again. They didn’t want the pain of death any more than anyone else did; in fact they dreaded it more, because they knew what it felt like. They knew, intimately, the terror of exsanguination, of losing the feeling in your toes, the creeping itch of death traveling up your legs to reach your heart.

But it was easier to fight, now, even knowing they would have pain, and maybe they would have blissful oblivion for a moment or two, but in the end, they would win. There was no other outcome.

Nicolò buried his sword into the lower belly of the first man who came too close right as Yusuf’s fingers closed around the hilt of the knife, kept hidden as it was just beneath the seat of the cart. He turned in time to watch the bellowing death cries of the man who had been cut, holding his insides as they gushed between his fingers.

The other bandits came in all at once, not caring if their swords snagged a friend or foe. Loose, wild, enraged slashes rained down on Nicolò, so much so that none of the men saw Yusuf’s approach, his feet bruising against the uneven, rocky ground, until it was much too late.

Ammar’s knife went deep through the side of a throat of his first target and was ripped out and finding vengeful, destructive purchase in the throat of the second before the other men turned to him. By then, Yusuf had gained a Bulgarian sword and was switching out the knife for it, dropping it to clatter to the rocks in time to bring the sword up in defense against a singing blow from a bandit. They were up close, the intimacy of swordplay reflecting in the gleam of their weapons and the shine of their eyes; the mottled, sour milk smell of the bandit filled his nose, and he wrinkled his face at it.

The bandit roared, slid his sword down the length of Yusuf’s, and came in opposite, from an angle that was harder to block. He tried to twist his blade in response, but the very tip of the enemy sword cut deep through his bicep, hitting bone. Yusuf bellowed, retreating from the follow-up slash, but his secure position had been unseated, and there were two more men behind the first who approached with violence in their intent.

Nicolò’s body, as bloody-red and scored as a butchered cow, lay on the rocks further down the shore. Yusuf kept one eye on him, waiting for the return. Their fighting style, though only practiced in the months since Jerusalem, had been whittled down to a partnership, something beautiful and known. While both could fight solo, they no longer preferred it.

Yusuf ducked a swing at his head and stabbed up from this low angle, catching a man’s thigh and following through with a cut that tore at skin and muscle. Then he rolled, his torso scratched by the rocks, but it was worth it, because he came up with the dagger in his off hand, the arm that had previously been nearly severed now back to fighting strength and dexterity.

The bandits saw it. They pulled back, amazed, and then they began to chatter between themselves, their gazes focused just over Yusuf’s shoulder. He didn’t have to look to know what they were seeing: Nicolò was rising, grunting from the effort, his skin now shiny and slick with blood.

“Let’s finish it fast,” Nicolò said, his voice tight.

At this bidding, Yusuf charged, wielding both weapons, and heard the rattle of Nicolò’s feet on the rocks behind him.

The bandits were fighting for more than their lives now; these were demons from hell, sent to deliver them to damnation. Their very souls were on the line. They fought as such, hacking away with their swords, screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs.

Yusuf received a cut across his face that nearly took off his nose, and he stumbled back, blinded by blood and watering eyes. Nicolò was there, stepping in front of him, his skin briefly whispering across Yusuf’s as he took on the killing blow that was being delivered from on high, his stance wide as he balanced beneath the clashed swords. The sounds of metal-on-metal were a chorus, the Slavonic curses a song of their ferocity, their fear.

Wiping away the last of the blood, enough to be able to open one eye, Yusuf struck out with the knife from beneath Nicolò’s raised arm, and he was shocked when two hands, neither of them holding a weapon, came back at him, snapped his wrist, and shoved the injury away. The knife dropped from his useless fingers as he cried out, and he watched helplessly as the man who had disarmed him leaned back on a foot and threw Ammar’s dagger over their heads, over the shore of the riverbank, in an arc that ended, with the softest of _plinks!_ , in the river.

“My knife!” Yusuf screamed, hit more by this sudden, unexpected loss than anything else in recent memory. He felt the bones in his wrist snap back into place, but he was already swinging his sword in the other hand, stepping to the far end around Nicolò to close the distance between them.

The bandits had seen his emotional reaction. Maybe they thought distracting them was the secret, or an overload of fear and pain would do it. They set about to fight close, to overwhelm the two men and possibly overcome their supernatural powers. They snorted and bellowed like animals, slapping their chests with fists, and the three remaining bandits stepped forward in a line like they were soldiers in an advancing army.

In their fury, as Nicolò moved to intercept it once again, the bandits made it past their meager opposing line. Yusuf was shoved backwards by a sword piercing deep into his chest, slipping in a too-lucky chance between two ribs. He gasped over the pain, fell backwards, and lost himself for a second as the pressure in his lungs deflated and a hot swirl of dizziness rushed behind his eyes.

He didn’t die. He kept himself awake, hyperventilating, while he watched from his position on the rocks, supporting himself with one elbow. Nicolò was a wonder, swinging the Bulgarian sword in a two-handed grip that he’d learned for a different weapon, a different reach, and yet he still managed to fell the first, the one Yusuf had injured on the leg, before twirling on his bare toes to neatly carve out the throat of the second.

Yusuf breathed heavily, trying to rush the healing he could feel curling through his chest, as if it was a power he could control. It went slow, however, and therefore he had no air to shout a warning as the final man burst his sword through Nicolò’s gut from the back, bringing a choking scream from deep in his partner’s chest. Nicolò had been glancing over at Yusuf, checking on him, a single moment’s distraction enough to kill.

With a heaving, ripping breath, as though Yusuf was tearing the lung all over again in his haste, he traded places with his partner, going up as the other went down. He scrambled on the rocks, his own sword back in his grip, stepped forward, and rent it from groin to sternum, passing through the heavy material of the leather and pelts the man wore. He made no other sound as he did so, breathing through his nose, his stare as hard as flint as the final bandit died, looking up at him as he sank to his knees. The life was already out of him by the time his body was settling backwards, but Yusuf had already turned.

“Nicolò,” he said, reaching. Nicolò was dead, as lifeless as the bandits around him. He had settled on his side, one knee drawn up like he’d been trying to run from his fate. His eyes were closed, and if it wasn’t for the peek of organs through the hole in his stomach, he could have been at peaceful rest beside him in their rented room.

Yusuf pulled the other man’s body around, kneeling uncomfortably on the rocks beside his head. He did not touch him more than that, as he would have normally; their nakedness, while ignored in battle, had too much while at rest. Yusuf would wait for him to awaken.

He waited. And he waited. Something dark and cruel whispered in his ear. Twice in barely two minutes this time: Nicolò had died in rapid succession during the quick fight. Maybe… what if…?

“Nicolò,” Yusuf said again, quieter this time. He wanted to touch, but he didn’t dare. Their bodies did not cool to the clammy, unnatural state of death while waiting to come back, and he feared now that he would reach to touch and find a rapid loss of the vitality of life. What if this time…?

Nicolò twitched. His face screwed up in a flinch of pain, as if he had died before he could follow through with the grimace that came from being gutted.

“Come back,” Yusuf encouraged softly. “That’s it, _hayati_.”

The other man groaned, bringing his hands to feel the wound in his abdomen close beneath them. “Done?” he grunted, after he was whole again.

“All done,” Yusuf sighed. “I’m sorry I let them get the jump on me. Surprise me,” he clarified, when Nicolò did not understand the colloquialism in Arabic.

“I shouldn’t have gone down the river.”

“They would have come either way. We might have gotten a chance to dress if I had been more alert.”

Nicolò looked down at himself as if he was seeing his, and Yusuf’s, nakedness for the first time. He sat up, the rocks beneath him rattling, and twisted his torso to look back at him. “Ammar’s knife,” he said quietly.

Yusuf gave a defeated expression, shrugging. The gesture did well to hide the true volume of the loss he was feeling. “You can’t keep things forever,” he said, and then realized exactly what he’d said, and what it meant to the two of them.

Nicolò held his gaze for a moment, then reached out a hand. When Yusuf took it, they tugged, pulling each other together into standing.

For a wild, heart-stopping moment, Yusuf thought the movement would continue into an embrace. Then Nicolò turned away quickly, his gaze having gone down to somewhere near Yusuf’s collarbone, and Yusuf took a step backwards, as if the blush that had risen on Nicolò’s cheek was liable to burn him.

“You’re covered in blood,” Nicolò said, and Yusuf knew he hadn’t been looking at anything else. Not the way he had been.

“You are too.”

“Lucky we didn’t ruin any clothes this time.” He said it with a half-smile, gently teasing.

“Let’s get back in the water.”

They went with much less joy and play than before, doing the duty of washing away the blood that was drying on their smooth, whole skin. The shadows of the injuries ached, especially in the shock of the lightning-cold water, and the most either of them could do was to settle on their knees on the muddy, slimy rocks in the river’s shallows and scrub away the stains with handfuls of water. They sat near to each other and did not speak at first.

Then Nicolò sighed. “I can’t reach,” he said, his head held low.

Yusuf looked; the blood washing away from their bodies was swirling in the gentle current around them like paint flow. Nicolò had been trying, futilely, to get the last of the crusted blood high on his back and shoulders, where the inflexibility of muscle and bone prevented his arms from folding into place enough to reach.

“Do you want me to…”

“If you could.” Nicolò had already turned, facing his back to him, spreading his shoulder blades to give the surface area a smoother finish.

Yusuf crawled close, sat back on his heels behind his friend, and brought up two handfuls of water. The water line was around their bellies where they had stopped, and he felt bizarrely like the nymphs of Greek myth, born and raised in rivers and shores. Now that they called Athens their temporary home, they had absorbed some of the culture, and mythology had been some of his favorites. He needed stories, now that he had no beliefs. He sluiced the water down Nicolò’s pale back, watching with a thrill as Nicolò reacted with a shiver.

“Sorry,” Yusuf said, barely a whisper.

“No,” Nicolò replied, a strange choice. “Just get it all.”

“It’s drying…”

“I know, I had to wipe at it.”

Yusuf’s hands tightened into fists. Then he repeated the motion, bringing a handful of water up, splashing it down from the back of Nicolò’s neck, but this time he accompanied it with his palm, rubbing at the dislodging stain. He had to repeat it a few times before the water finally ran clear. After each pass, he had to shake out his hand from the fiery-ice ache of the water and the touch running together.

Nicolò thanked him and turned, putting both his hands out to hold Yusuf’s jaw before he knew it was happening. “Close your eyes,” he instructed.

Yusuf obeyed, his heartbeat fluttering. He hoped Nicolò could not see it pulsing in the artery in his neck, or feel the tremble he had bitten down in his jaw.

Nicolò repeated the act of washing for Yusuf, getting the blood on his face that he couldn’t see, that he had forgotten was there. The world was filled with only the sounds of the water splashing, the gentle trickle of the river’s edges lapping at its shores and around their bodies. Nicolò’s hand traced the edges of Yusuf’s nose, eyes, and cheeks, rubbing and smearing like a potter shaping a vase.

Yusuf’s mouth was dry, his eyes shut to everything else. He was willing himself to stay still, to not react; his penis, beneath the water, was throbbing, and only the snowmelt temperature of the water was keeping it soft. No more touching after this, he vowed, another deal struck with only himself.

When it was done, Nicolò released him. “Anything left on me?” he asked, holding out his arms like he was waiting to be appraised.

“No. Me?”

“No.”

They rose together, walked together, and dressed together. Later, around a campfire, they sang together, and much later, they returned to Athens, to the room that was discounted for their troubles, and each one pet Toothy the mutt, having gained at least one ally.


	7. Day Two Hundred Twenty-three

☽

Nicolò’s keen eyes spotted it before Yusuf. He was standing slightly behind the other, carrying the basket, while Yusuf was weighing zucchinis in each hand. Nicolò’s attention had wandered, his gaze roving with a slightly glazed air over the heads of the shoppers around them, taking in the typical bustle of the marketplace. He loved the sounds of it, the languages and the arguments and the footsteps, the jangle of jewelry and rustle of linen sheeting. Because he wasn’t looking for anything in particular, what he saw grabbed him clearly: her face was sharp and familiar in the rest of the unfocused landscape.

It was the girl who had helped Yusuf save him from Giuseppe, months ago in Constantinople. What in the world was she doing in Athens?

He glanced back at his partner in front of him, now arguing with the merchant manning the market stall, then looked back at the girl. She was coming in the direction towards them, a light kerchief around her curly hair. Nicolò hadn’t been able to speak to her then, to thank her himself for her effort – his Arabic hadn’t been good enough – but Yusuf had told him later her name was Esen and that she thought she might know their secret. He’d also shared his private guess that she was almost certainly an orphan and possibly a member of one of the brothels that had shared the road with the brewery where they were staying. Nicolò remembered, vividly, coming back down the stairs and seeing their kiss.

He panicked as the distance between them closed. She hadn’t seen them yet. He could step in front of Yusuf’s side, turning his back to the girl as she came down the path between the rows of stalls, hiding both of their faces, as long as he distracted Yusuf long enough to keep his head looking down at whatever vegetables were on display while the girl passed them by, oblivious. She almost certainly wouldn’t recognize them from the back.

But he knew Yusuf would want to see her. He had mentioned her once or twice since the kidnapping, off-hand comments wondering how she was doing, hoping she was well. He did that with many of the men and women they had come across since Jerusalem; he was a deep well of kindness like that, and Nicolò loved it about him. If he found out later that Nicolò had spotted her in the crowd and hadn’t alerted him, he would be crushed. And Nicolò couldn’t lie to him, or deceive him.

“Yusuf,” he said in Zeneize, nudging his side with his elbow. When his friend looked, Nicolò moved his eyes and chin in a gesture of look-that-way. “Isn’t that…”

“Esen!”

Nicolò’s stomach knotted at the joy and surprise in Yusuf’s voice. They abandoned the zucchinis, moving through the current of other bodies to meet the girl halfway, standing in the middle of the wide path.

“It’s you,” she said, her eyebrows going up. Nicolò could read her as clearly as anything; she kept a smile off her face, but she was pleased to see them.

“Yusuf,” he introduced, his hand on his chest. “And this is Nicolò. I realized later I never gave my name.”

“I thought it was deliberate,” the girl shrugged.

“No, it was rude. But we were in a hurry, and I didn’t think… What are you doing in Athens?”

The girl shifted her weight. She was thinner than she’d been the last time they saw her, a sort of haggard look to her face that she hadn’t carried before. The dress she wore had been torn and repaired along the bottom hem, and Nicolò saw smudges of old dirt on her hands and caked beneath her fingernails. The only fine thing she wore or carried was the kerchief, and he had a snagging suspicion that it was not hers. “It was time for a new city,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, a failed attempt at confidence faltering in the way her mouth twitched out of its smirk.

“Are you in trouble?”

Esen glared. “Why would you ask that?”

“Because we could help, if you are.”

“I recall helping you two last time we saw each other,” she said, throwing Nicolò an exaggerated glance.

“Yes, and we’d like to return the favor.”

“I’d rather not get myself mixed up in Genovese drama again.”

“Our troubles are long gone,” Nicolò said, watching her twitch in surprise at his good Arabic, and he next watched the story of her thoughts, written on her face: she was wondering if she had said anything untoward, either just now or before, in Constantinople, that she thought he wouldn’t have understood. Back then, he hadn’t – Yusuf had filled him in on everything that had happened while he was tied up in the ship. But she would have to be careful not to insult him.

“Good. I wouldn’t want to have to rescue you again.” Her teasing came like it was natural, but it was uncomfortable receiving the words from her the way it had never been with Yusuf. Her jokes were tailored, almost like they were being bundled and sold to him. He remembered Yusuf’s supposition, and he remembered the kiss.

“I’d fear for anyone who came up against you,” he said, returning it gently, almost paternally. She sensed it, because her dark eyes narrowed, just a fraction.

“So what are you doing here?” Yusuf asked softly.

There was a pause of silence between them. Esen glanced around, as if she was realizing for the first time that she was in a marketplace in Athens.

“Are you hungry?” he continued, putting out a hand but not placing it, not yet. “We have lamb in our room, and some figs.”

She returned her gaze to them and nodded minutely.

They led her to their rented villa, the chipping white and brown of the limewashing needing several spots of touch-up. But their room was comfortable and as cheap as could be, for they were still doing weekly errands for a landlord who seemed to have taken quite a shine to them and their work ethic. Inside, Yusuf sat her down on one of the two chairs – at some point they had procured a second, making a cheerful mismatched set, for more comfortable mealtimes – and immediately unwrapped some of the keftedes meatballs from their dinner the night before.

Esen ate them quickly, even over a surprising attempt at being polite, but both men saw her hunger. She did not have to ask for more; Yusuf was already plating more of their stored food, some hard cheeses and grapes and almonds.

“Tell us why you’re in Athens,” Yusuf said when she finally slowed down, pinching a grape between two fingers. He was sitting at the other chair, leaning forward on the spindly table. Nicolò was sitting at the end of their bed, quiet.

“Constantinople wasn’t right for me anymore,” she said, using the Turkic name for the city. She shook her head. “I’m not in trouble, I’m just somewhere new.”

“Alone.”

“Yes, alone,” she said, raising a new glare at him. “You disapprove, _baba_?” _Dad_.

“Where are your real parents?”

“Where are yours?”

Yusuf glanced over at Nicolò, sharing with him an expression that wasn’t quite yet at exasperation, but it was close.

“We only want to help you, Esen,” Nicolò murmured, giving it a go. “If you tell us what it is that’s happening.”

“Nothing is happening,” she sighed, leaning back in the chair. Her kerchief was on the table, her thick hair free. “I’m not in any trouble, I’m not being chased, I’m not in debt. I just wanted a new city.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Some rooms.” She eyes theirs, as if she was about to make a comparison.

“Do you need money?”

“Why, are you finally looking to buy?”

Nicolò’s mouth tightened at the corners. Yusuf sighed, shaking his head. “No, we are not looking to buy from you.”

“No,” she said slowly, her dark eyes roving from one of them to the other. “I’d thought not.”

“We’re not interested in fifteen-year-olds,” Yusuf said flatly, a tinge appearing on his olive cheeks.

“Sixteen,” she said, lifting her chin, betraying her youth: only a sixteen-year-old would correct him in it with so much haughtiness. “I’m an adult, and I can do and give what I want.”

“As long as it doesn’t put you in danger, of course you can.”

“I’m not in danger, Yusuf.” She rolled his name in her throat, using it with familiarity instead of a more formal address, more of that barbed defensiveness coating her skin like armor. She stood, reaching for her kerchief. “Thank you for the food.”

Yusuf followed her into standing. “Are you sure you don’t need anything else?”

“Nothing you don’t want to give,” she said, grinning lasciviously, her hand out and touching his upper arm. He braved the touch, not wanting to offend, but Nicolò saw the rigidity of his legs as he stood straight.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing here for you like that,” Yusuf murmured after a moment, after her hand traced down his arm to hold momentarily at his wrist.

Esen nodded. “If you change your mind.” She gave him the address where she was staying, a building on the other side of the marketplace, in the district where the two of them had not needed to venture. She nodded at Nicolò politely, including him in her farewell, but the invitation had not been for him.

When the two of them were alone, the air seemed to swell back in, as if her presence had drawn some of it away. Yusuf made an aggravated noise, clearing the plate she’d left behind, brushing the crumbs to the floor.

“Would you?” Nicolò asked. He hadn’t moved once during the entire conversation, sitting rigidly on the side of the end of the bed, his hands on his knees.

“Would I what?”

“Change your mind.”

Yusuf turned too quickly, the knife he’d used to cut the cheese clattering on the fire-blasted clay of the plate. His expression, in an unusual change, was indecipherable – or maybe it was Nicolò who had lost his ability to read it, at least in this moment.

“No,” Yusuf said, almost leaving it at that, before his throat bucked in a swallow, and he continued, “Would you?”

“She didn’t want _me_.”

Yusuf continued to stare, still holding the plate like it was loaded with a precious weight and near tipping. “But there are… others.”

Other brothels, other women who worked at them. Both men came from wealth, albeit in slightly different ways and expressions of it, and there were always servants whose rears were easy to pinch, whose smiles were warm and welcoming and excited, especially when they and the sons of their masters were young, when two small bodies could fit into a dark, private alcove somewhere on the property owned by the people they served.

They had never spoken about this. It was strange, actually, that in all their late-night conversations, their jokes and tales and arguments and debates, never had they gotten close to the act of sex, to the women they had had before the army, before the war, before the immortality. Nicolò had never known another man, had a friendship with one, that had gone for so long without exchanging leering jokes and tales, probably far exaggerated, of their exploits. To never even mention it in passing, in a lecherous joke about breasts or milk or seed, was so unusual that by the time Nicolò had realized it was happening, it was too late to change.

Deeper than all of that, though, was the worry. His mottled, heat-scored dreams of passion had a different color to them, changed from the milky-pinks and baby-blues of adolescence, when he’d first felt the rise between his legs and knew it was because of the serving girl who leaned very far over the table when she poured, her breasts bound in the light blue bodice of her dress. Now, though, his dreams were more earthy: browns and tans and greens, and the skin he imagined beneath his hand and his mouth and his belly was no longer milk-white. And even with all that, he couldn’t feel any of it in a tangible way, had never been able to, and the conversations with other men had always served as a mask to it.

Nicolò shook his head. “I don’t need those others.”

“Me neither.”

They looked at each other again. Nicolò thought, just for a moment, that this would continue. This is where they would share the raucous laughter of men, slapping each other on the back and congratulating each other on their past, opening up for more exploits of the future. If he and Yusuf finally broke through this block, able to be as open and honest with each other about this final thing, the only bit of humanity they hadn’t yet debated or discussed, he would feel better about his brokenness.

“Do you ever?”

Nicolò jolted, relief flooding him. Yusuf, bold as ever, had done it first, and it warmed Nicolò to the point that it felt like he’d been drinking wine. “Do I ever need those others?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

A pause. This had taken a lot from both of them, and they needed to catch their breath, recover. Nicolò thought about the next thing to ask, thrilled by the fact that he was finally talking about it.

“When was the first time?” he ventured, clarifying next when Yusuf gave him a strange look. “When did you kiss someone for the first time?”

“I haven’t.”

“No one?”

“My mother, my brother. A girl from the farm where we traded goats, but it was her idea. We were about nine years old. I don’t think it counts.”

Nicolò shifted on his seat, turning to open up towards the long side of the bed. Yusuf set down the plate and came to join him, sitting beside him.

“Not after you grew up? You never saw her again?”

“She was already married and out of the house by the time…” Yusuf shrugged. “I didn’t like anyone else enough, and I was still faithful then, besides.”

“Hmm.”

“Well?” As in, your turn.

Nicolò briefly panicked, reaching for the lies he’d told before. _A girl from my house, the servant with the pale tits and the blue dress. A woman down the shore in Chiavari, a seamstress, whose work I had sought to repair my sister’s gown. The married Fiorentina woman, while her husband was trading in Venezia._ But while his fellows in the army had sucked these stories down, Nicolò had a feeling Yusuf wouldn’t believe him. They knew each other too well, and besides, Yusuf had been truthful, without shame. If he’d wanted this discussion for the veritas, for finally saying what he’d always suspected, he would have to reciprocate.

“No one.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

The truth was that, while Nicolò’s puberty had been filled with lusts, none of it had been in sharp relief. He’d wanted sex, wanted companionship, in the way of all men, but never had he wanted it enough to extend his hand and ask for it. He’d thought it over extensively, especially when he was younger and worried that he was wrong, sinful in a different way than the deadly sin. It wasn’t fear that stopped him, he knew; he could talk to anyone, man or woman, friend or foe. It wasn’t apathy; he burned with desire some nights, so much so that he’d had to work it out himself, his grip practiced and sweet and yet not enough, in the end. It was only that no one had struck him enough.

He said so now, telling this truth for the first time aloud. “I never met the right woman.”

“How would you know?”

“I’m… not sure.” It was a good question. Because he had never known what it felt like to want, maybe he wouldn’t know what it felt like when it happened. He puzzled over this, introspective, so deeply happy that Yusuf had begun this that he couldn’t concentrate.

“What if…”

Nicolò looked over, waiting for Yusuf to finish.

There was a knock at their door, but before either of them could do more than jump at the surprise of it, the door was opening, Esen tumbling through. Her kerchief was tied, disheveled, around her throat instead of on her hair, her eyes were bloodshot from crying, and there was a growing bruise on her cheekbone, red now, blackly purple later.

“I lied,” she sobbed. “I lied, I am in trouble.”

☉

Yusuf pushed the door closed with his shoulder, his hands on the top of her arms. “Are they following?”

“Possibly, yes,” she said, gulping through crying. “I ran. I’m fast, but they might’ve seen.”

“We have to leave, then,” he said, looking for Nicolò, who was already hefting the longsword and the scimitar in his hands.

The three of them slipped out the door, looking out into the sunstreaked afternoon. The pedestrian road that brought them to the front door of their villa was quiet; down the lane, Toothy their landlord’s mutt was snoozing at the front stoop of his rooms. The dog had an excellent nose for trouble and would have been snapping and snarling if rogues had come down this way, chasing Esen.

“This way,” Yusuf said, turning them down the sea stairs to the beach, where the high tide was almost to the steps and the mild drop-off of the retaining cliffside. They took the shell-pocked stairs to the sand, their boots wetting in the tide, and followed the sandy curve of the shoreline, their heads beneath the rocky line where the city ended.

“Who are they?” Nicolò asked.

“I don’t know—”

“Esen,” Yusuf said, a warning.

She faltered, grumbling. “I _don’t_ ,” she insisted. “Just that they’re after my madam for some money they think she owes.”

“What does that have to do with you?”

“She promised me to them.”

“Wait,” Yusuf said, still leading the trio. Their footprints, left behind in the soggy sand, were quickly being washed away. “Your madam here or in Constantinople?”

“In Constantinople.”

“And that’s why you’re in Athens. You came here to get away from them.”

“Yes. They were about to pack me onto a ship, taking me God knows where. Just like with your Nico here.”

“Nicolò,” Yusuf corrected quickly, without thinking, but Nicolò chuckled behind them.

“Nicolò, then. I didn’t want that any more than you did. I escaped, got my way onto a different ship that same night. I didn’t know where they were bound and found myself in Athens. The captain… liked me, but I got away from him too.”

“Esen,” Yusuf said, a sigh, a moan.

She froze, standing in the middle of the two men. Fury radiated off her like heat from a campfire. “If you’re going to lecture me, you can stop right here and let me go off on my own. I don’t need _anything_ from you, if that’s what you have for me.”

“I’m not—”

“You want to know what it’s like being a girl? Being Turkish? Being an orphan through no fault of my own?”

Yusuf couldn’t argue. He knew, through mild contact with the trading routes in Anatolia and surrounding lands, of the conquest of the peoples of her kingdom. He knew of the slavery and the hardships. She had done as well as she could for herself, learning Arabic, finding enough to eat, losing a bit of herself in Constantinople and trading it for the security of an income, no matter how it was earned.

“I don’t know anything about your life,” he conceded, looking around. Somewhere in the distance, a dog had begun to bark. “But I know—"

Nicolò jerked forward, grunting, and splashed to his knees in the lapping waves. A small, shallow-bladed throwing knife was jutting from the middle of his back, close to the ridge of his spine.

The men were coming down the shoreline, shouting in Turkic and Arabic. Three of them, skinny like teenagers, ran down the shore, following the last of the footsteps the fleeing trio had left behind.

“That whelp belongs to us,” said the man in the lead, pointing a dirty finger at Esen.

“Who’s going to answer to this?” Yusuf shouted, gesturing to his friend at his feet with the knife in his back.

“Ah, it’s not even deep,” said a second, the knife-thrower, with more knives hanging from his belt.

“We got your attention,” said the lead man. “Don’t you go for those weapons now, boy,” he added in a warning to Nicolò, who had dropped both onto the sand when he fell. He was on one knee, his rage kindling, his back facing the other men.

“Take it out,” he muttered to Yusuf in Ligurian.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’ll kill all of them.”

“Stop talking! Give us the girl.”

“No chance of that,” Yusuf replied, back to Arabic. “She doesn’t want to go with you.”

“She ain’t got a choice, stranger.”

“I can’t fight properly with it in,” Nicolò said.

“We can’t kill them in the middle of the city.”

“We’re not in the city, we’re on the beach.”

“Stop talking now!”

“We’re deciding something!” Yusuf snapped.

“Deciding what?”

“Whether to kill you.”

The trio of pursuers laughed like the audience of a play, braying and sneering.

“Yusuf…” Esen whispered behind him. She had turned into something younger, her hands clasped together near her chin. “If I go with them, I’m lost.”

“I know.”

“We’ll give to you to a count of three.”

“We’ll give _you_ that much! Or we go fetch the city watch.”

“Fetch ‘em all you like, stranger, the girl’s still coming with us. I dunno if she mentioned, but her life is worth more to me than it does to her, and the debts her mistress owed were paid in full. She’s ours. Tell that to the city watch. I don’t think they much like runaway slaves, or the people who help ‘em.”

“I don’t much like slavery,” Yusuf whispered.

“Yusuf, take it out.”

“We can’t fight here.”

“It hurts—”

Yusuf pulled the knife from his friend’s back and overhanded it, a near-perfect throw that nevertheless missed by inches as the men scattered like excited monkeys. Then they advanced, still chattering, and Yusuf reached for the scimitar, his heart momentarily breaking. Would there always be this much violence? Would there always be men around the next corner, waiting to stab and strike and spear, trying to hurt him and his friend and anybody else around?

He ducked the swing of the nearest sword, a beautiful long paramerion straight from the Byzantine army, and Yusuf briefly wondered if the man was a veteran. Then his thoughts were interrupted: another throwing knife had whistled over, slicing a line against the inside of one thigh as it passed and bounced, but at least he did not have to pretend to be destabilized by it. The wound was minor, and he could limp for a moment before ignoring it completely.

“Hobble, don’t kill!” he shouted to Nicolò, who had moved backwards when Yusuf had gone forward, standing in front of Esen like he was a living shield. Her hands gripped the sides of his shirt like a toddler as he fought, stepping in rhythm with him.

Yusuf found quickly, though, that fighting to disarm and deescalate was much harder than going for the kill. It would have been easier to snake his sword into the underside of this man’s arm after catching it aloft, cutting the vein there and letting him soak his blood into the Aegean. But he wasn’t letting that happen. Bodies left on an abandoned roadside, or piled in the streets of Jerusalem as it burned from sacking, were one thing, but they were within the walls and streets of a civilized city, and murder was still a crime.

A scream, high-pitched and frantic, blasted suddenly, making Yusuf turn in fright. He recognized it immediately not as Esen, who would have had the dignity to die quieter than that, but as one of the trio, whose hands had been severed by Nicolò’s longsword.

“Oh, fucking hells, Nicolò—”

“ _No!_ ”

Both of his friends screamed it together, as Yusuf looked over his shoulder. He felt the blade of the paramerion pass over his throat, but not cleanly; the downstroke was diagonal, going across his Adam’s apple and across the flat of one pectoral, loosening his grip on his scimitar as tendons and tensions were lost. He stumbled backwards, thinking, _Close your eyes, Esen_ , before he lost himself.

And came back, Esen’s face blurred by his grogginess and her tears. She was cradling him in her lap, holding his limp body. He had been well and truly dead; there was a difference between losing so much blood that you passed out before recovering, and the finality, or at least semi-finality, of death.

She saw his life return in a flutter, because she choked on a scream. “Nico!” she called, breathless and harsh-voiced.

Yusuf turned his head. Nicolò was coming in from the tide, wading like a sea god coming to land. There was no one else around on the shoreline.

“I knew it,” Esen whispered, rocking Yusuf’s head and chest in the embrace of her arms. “I knew it.”

“Where are the bodies?” Yusuf asked, letting her hold him for a few heartbeats before sitting up. His torn shirt flapped open at the chest where the sword had sliced cleanly, soaked in blood. The sand around them, where the waves had not yet gone high enough, was torn like a battlefield and just as stained, deep, scuffing footprints and drag marks telling dead men’s tales.

“Out to sea,” Nicolò said. He was blood-splattered like the same vengeful sea god, and a dark look haunted his eyes.

“I said not to kill them,” Yusuf protested weakly, pushing up to standing. Esen followed, her hands clutching at his arm, though whether as support for him or for her, he didn’t know.

“There was no choice once your throat was opened.” And Nicolò was not looking at Yusuf when he said it.

Esen saw it too. “You saved me,” she said to him. “You didn’t have to.”

“Nicolò—”

His friend false-started, whatever word was in his throat hurting like its own wound. “We said—”

“Nicolò, _o mæ amô_ , if you take one step forward, I will cut you down.”

Both of them looked to him. Yusuf raised his chin. “I love you, my friend, and I hope you would forgive me this, but she is leaving.”

“She knows.”

“She does. She’s known since Constantinople.”

Esen, wisely, stayed quiet, though they were speaking in Arabic for her, and she could have easily interjected.

“She hasn’t told anyone. Have you? No,” he said for her, when she shook her head, her eyes piercing the figure of Nicolò standing across from them. She had let go of his arm and was standing with fists by her sides, her chin jutting in defiance. A child with an entire lifetime behind _and_ ahead of her.

“Can we trust you?” Nicolò asked her, his voice tight with the danger she was facing.

“Yes,” she said, biting through the words like they were bone. “I owe you my life.”

“You tell… no one…” Nicolò came forward one step on each beat, and though he wanted to, Yusuf didn’t move, letting his friend force down the threat. He could see how much it was hurting him to do it.

“I tell no one,” Esen repeated, her gaze fixed on his. “But will you answer some questions?”

“Yes,” Yusuf said, speaking over the derisive grunt from his friend. “If it will satisfy your curiosity and stop you from pursuing them elsewhere.”

“Is it both of you?”

“Yes,” Nicolò answered first, surprising him.

“Is it anything?”

“So far,” Yusuf said.

“How long?”

“Almost a year.”

“Can I get it somehow?”

The two of them looked at each other, brokenhearted.

“I don’t… think so. We don’t know how, or why.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Every time,” Nicolò said.

“What do you see?”

Yusuf blinked slowly. “Nothing. Nothingness. And then we come back.”

“No heaven? No paradise?”

“No,” Nicolò gave, lowering his head a bit. They were witnessing her loss just as they had experienced, even without the proof they had to go through to get there. Yusuf hoped she hadn’t relied on her faith as a way to navigate the stormy waters of her troubled life, because it seemed like she wouldn’t have it much longer. Just as they had, and had no longer.

“Do you think… it will be forever?”

Yusuf sighed, shaking his head, though not in an answer. “We don’t know. We’re not sure. We hope someday we’ll learn more.”

“I hope you do too. I can’t imagine it.”

They all three paused, letting the sigh of the waves lap at their feet. The tide was still coming in higher, cleaning away their mistakes on the sand, as the water got closer and closer to consuming the strip of sandy beach all the way to the rocky face of the low cliffside.

Nicolò broke the silence. “Do you swear, on your life and ours, whatever that means to you, that you will not tell a soul?”

“I swear, on my life and yours. I’m sorry I found out. I didn’t mean to… I just wanted to help Yusuf, back then, and I needed help now.”

“And we were happy to give it,” Yusuf said. “We don’t regret meeting you, Esen.”

“I’m glad I know you, too. I hope we will see each other again, someday.”

She knew. She was too smart not to. Knowing their secret was one thing, but there was too much danger, and too many unknowable paths, for it to be any other way.

They changed their clothes and brought her to the harbor, each one standing on either side of her, each one holding her hand. They found and quietly paid for the passage, slipping in a warning to the captain that, no matter what, this passenger wasn’t to be touched. If she arrived at their destination with a single strand of hair out of place, they would know, and the man and all the rest of his crew would be sorry. And the captain agreed, his eyes snagging on the gold in their palms.

“He looks kind of like a mole,” Yusuf said, as she was standing with one foot on the plank, about to board. “He’ll know our names, and he’ll be happy to have you, as long as you work hard.”

“Practice your Greek with the crew,” Nicolò said. “And _only_ your Greek.”

She grinned, the wicked light back in her deep, dark eyes. “Yes, _papà,_ ” she said, startling him, Yusuf having slipped the word to her under his breath.

“Be safe, Esen.”

“I will.” She gazed at him for a moment, then she darted forward. Her lips planted the kiss on his cheek, warm and buzzing like springtime. She did the same for Nicolò. “Thank you.” Then she stepped onto the boat for Cyprus without looking back.

Later, so much later that the moon was rising low on the horizon, they returned to the sea steps beside their villa. Wordless, they walked down together to the waterline.

The sand was cool, smooth, and clean, reflecting silver moonlight back at them, the ocean sighing its eternal breaths. They stood side-by-side, looking at the distant curve of the world.

“Are you worried?” Nicolò asked eventually.

“No. Are you?”

A beat. “No.”

“I’m sorry it happened like that. And I’m sorry I threatened you.”

“I forgive you. I know it would have hurt you to do it.”

“It would have.” It didn’t surprise Yusuf that Nicolò knew this, or that he acknowledged it.

After another beat of the roll of ocean waves, Nicolò spoke again. “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“You said you loved me.”

“Of course I do.”

“But do you?”

Yusuf’s breath caught in his throat. A fiery heat and icy cold together shot through his veins, piercing deep in his gut. For a moment, he couldn’t hear, or speak, or feel.

“Yusuf.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I love you too.”

They were each still facing the sea, and they were saying it out to the sea, not to each other.

Nicolò was braver. “I didn’t know what it was. What it felt like.”

“I did. I knew it that day I was sick. I’ve known it every night since, beside you in the bed.”

“You never said anything.”

“I didn’t think… I was afraid. I tried. I called you _my love_.”

“I didn’t know it meant… this.”

They finally turned, as one, looking for it in the other’s eyes.

“What do we do?” Yusuf asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Can we…”

They inched forward. Yusuf reached for his hand, holding it, twining their fingers together. The sea was lapping around their ankles, as high as it would go.

He snaked his other hand around Nicolò’s waist, going slow, waiting for any resistance, any pulls away. But Nicolò only came forward. Their intertwined hands let go again, Yusuf’s going high, into Nicolò’s hair, while Nicolò’s went low, feeling for the line of Yusuf’s hip.

There was a minute hesitation, their lips close as their air mingled for one, two, three breaths, then two simultaneous smiles, and the kiss, finally, clumsy, breathless, giggling, and again, another try, heavier, this time with movement, and tongues flicking, and the break apart to check, and to smile again, eyes wide and shining with moonlight and sunlight, finally, after all this time, after doubt and fear and shame, never again, not anymore, now that there was this.


	8. Days Two Hundred Twenty-four and Two Hundred Twenty-seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is marked NSFW, E for Explicit. It can be skipped without losing too much of the storyline.

☽

They backed up the sea stairs, their feet finding clumsy purchase as they stepped and laughed and missed and kissed and stepped, but they made it to the road and the entranceway of their villa, which they pushed through, breathless from the effort and the exhilaration.

Nicolò was himself almost dizzy with the relief at what he’d found at the end of this. He’d thought he was broken, empty, and, at least before the immortality, destined for an unhappy life of searching, always searching, never finding what felt right enough to submit to and consume. He’d wanted love, companionship, and gratification, but no one else had ever seemed to offer it in the right way.

Yusuf gave it, all of it and more. He was the power and the pleasure and the partnership. He was the missing link between heaven and earth, answering questions Nicolò hadn’t even known he’d had. He was there, giving up all his secrets, and Nicolò lapped them up like ambrosia from a chalice.

Inside their villa, they came together again, their hands seeking out corners of skin and muscle that they’d never seen before, not really, not even when they’d fought at the river. That battle had been sexless, desperate and driven by survival. This, now, was a celebration of that survival. They were living, they were _full_ of life, and they would revel in it.

Yusuf snaked his fingers below the hem of Nicolò’s shirt, pushing it high around his ribs and dragging his fingertips down the sides of his waist. Nicolò squirmed, laughing. “Ticklish,” he said in Zeneize, a word they’d never used, but surely Yusuf understood, because he giggled too, and said it back in Arabic. Then he continued bringing the shirt high, bunching it around Nicolò’s armpits and neck until he helped himself out of it.

Yusuf leaned forward, kissing his newly-revealed skin, his beard brushing the hairs on Nicolò’s chest. He very briefly, very lightly, licked one nipple, and Nicolò inhaled sharply.

“Too much?”

“No.” But Nicolò moved his arms around Yusuf’s waist, undressing him too, instead of letting him continue. He took on the duty for a moment, planting dry kisses, brief touches of lips, down the line of Yusuf’s throat and into the garden of dark, curly chest hair. Always, as a youth, the skin he’d pictured in a scene like this had been vaguely smooth, vaguely pale, and he delighted now in learning and relearning how wrong he’d been. _This_ was correct.

They turned, their arms folded over one another, drinking deeply from the wells of the other’s mouth once again, their bare chests together, bare stomachs bucking against each other from breathing and the slightly-awkward negotiation of movement. One day, Nicolò knew suddenly, they would be able to do this as one person, stepping and twirling and holding without a single stumble, without coming apart when one of them went right and one went left. One day they would know each other like no one else in the world knew another.

At the bed, Yusuf leaned back first, his arm around Nicolò’s neck, dragging him down. Nicolò obliged, his hands braced on either side of Yusuf’s hips and stabilizing his descent. They turned lengthwise, mussing the blanket beneath them, but then they were lying, Nicolò nearly pressing Yusuf flat with his own body.

“All right?” Nicolò whispered, briefly worried that his weight was too much. They were almost of a weight, with Yusuf gaining only an inch or two of height, and Nicolò had heard from his brothers-in-arms the techniques, during the times when advice was being passed about in a serious rather than jeering manner.

“Yes,” Yusuf breathed, his eyes closed. “Yes.”

Nicolò explored again, after another minute of kissing and breathing. They were learning together, what went right, what went wrong. They had begun the use of tongues more, and their breathing sharpened, their mouths open against each other. Nicolò brought his elbows up to bookend around Yusuf’s jaw, both his hands digging at his curls, tugging slightly at the roots. 

Yusuf wiggled after a moment, his head tipped back to ask for the kisses that Nicolò gave along the long tendons of his throat. He curled up, around, ending up above, long and flat like Nicolò had been. He ground his pelvis against him for a moment, and Nicolò saw stars, groaning, his head pressing back into the pillow.

Then Nicolò felt the tie of his pants being loosened. “No,” he said, opening his eyes. “Not yet.”

The hand came away immediately. “Of course, _hayati_.” Yusuf leaned back for a kiss, to whisper into his ear and jawline. “What do you want?”

“Just this, for now,” Nicolò said, though he was burning. “Kiss me.”

Yusuf kissed him, long and slow and deep, his fingertips tracing every rise and valley of his belly and ribs and chest. Nicolò had his arms folded around Yusuf’s neck, pulling him as close as he could go, and he shifted one leg up, bending at the knee, as they rocked slightly against one another, the friction of it intoxicating.

“I love you,” Yusuf began, after breaking away from a kiss and breathing it into Nicolò’s ear, tonguing the earlobe. “I love your eyes, I love your smile, I love your hands.”

Nicolò made a throaty noise of encouragement.

“I love your passion, and your bravery.”

“I love your strength,” Nicolò said in return. “I love your heart.”

“I am so lucky.”

“I’m sorry I was there that day.”

Yusuf’s head rose from where he was kissing down the centerline of Nicolò’s belly. “I know.”

Nicolò felt tears coming and blinked them away, turning his head to the side to hide the flush of shame on his cheeks. Luck had nothing to do with it. If the Christian army had not been there, thousands upon thousands of people would not have died in blood and fire. If he had not allowed himself to descend into hatred and xenophobia and righteousness, he would not have to live with the guilt of being a part of what that campaign had become.

“ _Αγάπη μου_.” _My love_. Yusuf slid back up along Nicolò’s torso. “Please don’t cry.” He put a hand against Nicolò’s cheek, cupping it, his thumb wiping beneath his eye.

“I’m sorry,” Nicolò said thickly. Not just for ruining this moment, but for all of it. He’d said it before, in sunlit moments of lucidity, when they’d been serious and calm and reflective. He’d always meant it, always taking on the blame and shame from being part of the invading, massacring force. And Yusuf, kind, considerate Yusuf, had always accepted, even back when they hadn’t had much except the near-forced nature of their partnership.

“Nicolò, look at me.”

He looked, finding the gleam of Yusuf’s eyes in the dark of their room. Their window was open, letting in the pleasant cold of the outside, and their bodies were warm together, as they had always been, in this bed.

“You said once us finding each other had made the rest of it worth it. That you would hesitate before changing the course of history in order to stop the city’s fall, because we are together because of it. Well, you can’t change history. You can only look forward. You can only do the next right thing. I fell in love with you in that moment, because I saw how much you cared, and how much you were suffering, and I love you too much now to let you continue to be in pain. I need you to forgive yourself, because now you’re hurting me by letting yourself continue to hurt.”

Nicolò sobbed once, chuckling weakly and wetly.

“It’s not fair to me, _habibi_ ,” said Yusuf, smiling and kissing him on the lips. “I can’t stand to see you carry this grief. Will you try? Forgive yourself, and love me, and help the next people who need it.”

“I do love you.”

“And?”

“And… I will forgive myself.”

“That’s all I ask, Nicolò di Genova.”

Nicolò shifted, moving to hold Yusuf’s hips, his hands spread on his lower back. “I’m sorry I ruined our first kiss.”

“Stop apologizing.”

“Sorry.”

Yusuf growled, bringing his mouth down to bite playfully at his neck. Nicolò laughed, arching beneath him.

“You know, Esen was right.”

“About?” Yusuf said, his cheek now resting on Nicolò’s chest.

“Nico is short for Nicolò.”

Yusuf raised his head again, a dumbfounded expression on his face.

“It’s what all my family calls me.”

“You’ve had a nickname all this time and you never told me?”

“I liked it when you said my full name.”

“Nico,” Yusuf said, testing it.

“Mm, I like that too.”

“Nico, Nico, Nico…”

Nicolò shuddered, one hand cupped around the back of Yusuf’s neck as he said the name between licks and pecks and bites, moving in a line across the top of his chest. He was hard, and Yusuf was too, their groins rutting against each other as they lay on the bed, but not now. Not yet.

“We should sleep,” Yusuf said later. Their mouths were sore and bruised, and Nicolò’s chin was raw with burn from Yusuf’s beard. He was already planning how to hide it, to skip his morning shave in only a few hours, due to how late in the night it was. Then he realized he was being an idiot.

“I can barely think,” Nicolò replied, in groggy agreement. Yusuf was laying with his cheek on his chest again, and Nicolò’s hand was idly brushing through his hair, feeling the tiny bounce of the curls.

“This is the beginning of it, you know.”

“I know.”

“Forever.”

“Probably.”

They looked at each other one last time, drinking in the sight of the other’s face just inches away in the dark. They kissed one last time, lingering and soft. Then they rolled, and slept as they always had, except this time, they were one.

☉

One dawn, a few days on from then, Yusuf woke to the sound of rain. He cursed, seeing it dripping through the window they had left open during the night. He unhooked his arm from around Nico’s torso and vaulted awkwardly above his body, left sleeping beneath the blanket. He shivered as he went to the shutter, pausing briefly to look out into the beautiful, natural gray of clouds over the seascape, before he snapped it closed. There was a puddle on the floor below the window, but he ignored it. Their bloody clothes from the beach fight had already been burned, and there was nothing else in their room to mop it up.

When he went back to the bed, Nicolò was stirring. He was a light sleeper, or at least lighter than Yusuf. He raised his head, blinking blearily at the dim light.

“Our job is probably canceled,” he murmured. The cooper for whom they had done several jobs, busywork that was mainly manual lifting, had wanted them in his shop today, but the rain would disrupt the supply line.

“Almost surely,” Yusuf agreed, climbing back into his spot. As he went, he felt Nicolò turn onto his back, taking up more room on the mattress, lifting one hand to clasp around his ankle.

Yusuf smiled softly, obliging, taking position sitting on the other man’s hips, bending at the waist to cup his face in his hands for a kiss.

“We have nothing to do this morning.”

“We could stay here.”

“Mm.”

Yusuf wiggled downwards, his knees supporting him and bringing his body closer to Nicolò’s. He felt the other man respond, sitting slightly up to meet him. They kissed for several long moments, until Yusuf had to come up for air, his face warm. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

Nicolò gazed up at him, his eyelids low. “I want you.”

Yusuf looked back, needing confirmation, but he had already responded, a jolt going through his lower abdomen into his groin.

“Now? You’re ready?”

“Yes.”

Yusuf took a deep, stabilizing breath, preparing. They had spent the last few days teetering on the edge, careful of the other, waiting for the time. There was no hiding their desire, of course, especially wrapped as close as they could get in each other’s arms, but since that first night, they had waited for the perfect opportunity.

Yusuf lowered himself, lying along Nico’s body at one side, kissing with their heads slightly aloft. The hand that was on the topside trailed down his belly, waiting for a flinch, approaching the waistband of his pants.

Nico nodded his face against Yusuf’s. Yusuf rubbed cheek-to-cheek in response, his hand slipping beneath the fabric for the first time, finding the thicker patch of hair and then the soft skin of his cock. He trailed his fingers down it, putting just enough pressure into a squeeze to change the rhythm of Nicolò’s breathing.

He stroked for a time, going slow. Nico groaned beside him, his head falling back.

“Too much?”

“Not enough.”

Yusuf laughed. He squirmed down Nico’s body, hooking his fingertips into his pants and rolling them down his legs. Nico helped, bringing his knees up and tenting the blanket around them before Yusuf shoved it away completely. The rainy, moist air inside the villa was cold, but it would heat up in no time.

Yusuf rolled out of his own pants, going fast rather than sensual. His dick was throbbing, yearning to be free.

Undressed, Nico sat up onto his rear, pulling Yusuf close as he kneeled upright, his knees sinking into the soft mattress. He wrapped his arms around Yusuf’s middle, and they kissed from this uneven height, Yusuf’s groin trapped between them. Then they broke apart, and Nicolò brought one hand around to touch Yusuf, practicing, exploring, like he had done. Yusuf let his head tip back, his hands buried in Nico’s hair.

Nico took away his hand and came forward with his mouth. Yusuf gasped, bucking momentarily, his thighs already weakening.

It was everything and nothing he had expected. Flickering candleflames wound up and down his legs, and his eyelids fluttered, the build-up sweet agony.

Nico shifted upwards and joined him in kneeling on the mattress, embracing him, grinding his pelvis against Yusuf’s.

Yusuf groaned, ready to fall. “I want you in me. Can you sit back?”

Nicolò obeyed, his eyes shining as he gazed up. “I’ve never…”

“Nor I. Can we try?”

“Yes. There’s olive oil in the jar next to the pita.”

Yusuf went for the jar, padding naked to the eating nook at the foot of their bed. When he came back, Nico watched his every move, sitting up with his legs curled close to himself.

Yusuf dribbled a pool of olive oil onto his palm and stroked it onto Nico’s cock, watching with delight at the pleasure in his friend’s – partner’s, companion’s? – face. Then he leaned forward, bringing his fingers to his hole, circling it.

Nicolò put his hands on Yusuf’s hips, pulling him forward. Yusuf went, leaning in for a kiss, which Nicolò gave enthusiastically, as Yusuf settled onto his knees just above Nico’s spread thighs, going high, reaching down, and then lowering himself.

A moan rippled from Nicolò’s throat, his head going back as he lost the contact of the kiss. Yusuf responded in kind, but he was concentrating too, going slow. It was hurting, but it was pleasure too, of the truest kind, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before he would have to have Nico start stroking him.

He came back up, breathing hard.

“Is it okay?” Nico asked softly, his eyes opening as he watched.

“Yes.” Yes, it was okay. Yusuf went down again, letting Nico in deeper, and this time he stayed in as he pulsed up and down, his legs quivering from the exertion.

“Oh god, Yusuf,” Nicolò said.

“Nicolò,” he panted in response. “Nicolò, my Nicolò.”

“I’m yours.”

“I’m yours.”

They came forward together, kissing hungrily, drinking it, as Yusuf’s lower back flexed, up and down up and down. He reached for himself, but Nico beat him there, encircling his cock with his thumb and forefinger, letting Yusuf’s pounding body match the same rhythm as inside.

They began to moan together, too, vocal and insistent, and thunder rumbled outside again, but they were too lost in themselves and one another to hear anything but the swelling of their blood.

“I love you—"

“I love you, I love you—”

They brought their mouths together, but there was no room, no power for kissing, their lips hanging open and barely touching, panting one breath in and one breath out, their foreheads pressed together like they were sharing a mind as well as the rise of the sweet, suffering agony within.

“Nicolò—"

“Yusuf—"

Their bodies convulsed. The shock ran through one and into the other and back again, a great seizing of themselves that came from throat and cock together, moaning and spurting and trembling. Yusuf felt Nicolò rock inside him, his hips moving up to go as deep as he could, and he pushed back in kind, clutching Nico with his fingers digging sharp into the back of his neck, riding his own wave as he released between them.

Then there was stillness in the warm room as they panted, recovering, the rain plucking gently against the walls and on the beaten stones of the roads. They kissed clumsily, spent, and Yusuf lifted his tired thighs one last time, bringing some of Nico with him.

Nico shifted, turning his legs flat, leaning up against the wall. He brushed some hair away from his forehead, and Yusuf looked into his shining eyes, smiling tiredly.

“I’m so glad it’s you,” Nico said, and Yusuf’s heart swelled, and his cock throbbed.

“Me too.”

“Come here.”

Yusuf went, sparing, for the moment, the clean-up he needed. He leaned up into Nico’s chest, letting himself be encircled by Nico’s arms as he cuddled close. They kissed like that, Yusuf’s head tipped slightly back and sideways, slow and tender-dry.

“Are you hurt at all?” Nico asked, breathing it into Yusuf’s cheek.

“Not at all. The oil was good.”

“Very good.”

“You’ve really never—”

“I swear,” Nicolò chuckled. “Not even a kiss. I kept waiting for whatever I found in you.”

“What did you find in me?”

“I don’t have words for it. It’s everything. Your laugh. Your voice. Your sense of honor.”

Yusuf listened, smiling, his eyes closing.

“How long have you loved me?”

He moved his head again, wanting eye contact. This was more serious, more intense, than the love-talk. “Weeks. Since autumn, when I tried to leave after you saw my drawings.”

“I remember.”

“I didn’t know it for sure until that night, when you talked me back to the room and took care of my illness. You said that all we have now is experiences, and I knew I wanted to experience it all with you. Even if you didn’t love me back, or would ever share this—” – he gestured down at their naked bodies – “—with me.”

“Your drawings did it for me.”

Yusuf squinted. “I thought you didn’t know you were in love until the night with Esen.”

“I didn’t know I was in love with you, but when I saw the drawings, something spoke to me that it was… that it was right, somehow. I thought it meant that we were supposed to stay together because of the immortality.” He chuckled at himself. “Even later, when you started calling me _my love_ and _my heart_ , I thought you were saying it because we were partners and you were good with words.”

“I was saying it because I loved you, you stump.”

Nicolò laughed. “I know that _now_.”

Yusuf quieted, his head nestled in the spot between arm and side, looking up at the ceiling of their room. The rain was falling at the same pace, drowning this city by the sea.

Nico’s cool voice was as pleasant a sound as all that. “Do you remember the second day of the immortality? When you saw me by the well?”

“And you kneed me in the groin? Yes, I remember that very well.”

He chuckled at the embarrassment of that assault. “What did you say when I was screaming? I was asking ‘why, why do we have it’, and you replied.”

“I knew you were upset about the immortality. After you kneed me, and you were repeating something—”

“’Why’, over and over.”

“—I thought as much. I said, ‘I won’t give you anything’.”

Nicolò moved his head, compelling Yusuf to glance sideways, and they shared a long look. “Anything being…?”

“Answers. Absolution.” Yusuf touched his fingertips to Nico’s chin, holding it in place so that he couldn’t look away. “I knew you were in pain. I knew you felt alone. Right then, I didn’t care. When the guards came, and you killed them instead of letting them kill me, I saw you differently. Right away I saw that there was something about you, and I thought maybe it was in me too, for us both to have it. I tried to tell you to leave the city, for your own good—”

“I was horrified at the idea of going with you at first.”

“I saw that. I was disgusted you thought I’d suggested it.”

“You did!”

“I didn’t. Not at first. Once you misinterpreted it, I reassessed.”

They paused again, exhausted. It was still mid-dawn, the dull, gray light of the stormy weather making it gloomy, as if the day had already given up on itself. Yusuf snuggled up closer to Nicolò’s body, sticky with sweat and seed.

“We’ve died a lot.”

“We have.” Yusuf kissed at the pectoral muscle beneath his cheek. “Have you kept count?”

“I lost it some time ago.”

“Me too.”

“I can’t watch you die again.”

Yusuf sat up now, pulling away to stare intently. “Nothing has changed.”

“Everything has changed, Yusuf.” Nicolò shifted too, sitting up straighter. “This, between us. I’m terrified. I can’t even think of losing you now. It makes me sick. On the beach with Esen, even before we said it aloud, all the color left your face, and I screamed your name, and you weren’t there to respond, and you took so long to come back, I had almost given up. Going into the sea to drown the bodies, I thought of drowning myself too, in case it was true.”

Yusuf darted forward, his hands holding Nico’s jawline, touching his forehead with his. Nicolò wrapped his arms around his back in response, breathing through his nose.

“We’re immortal,” Yusuf murmured. “Nothing can hurt us. Nothing can take us away from each other for long. We will always come back to each other. We will always be here again.”

“Is it supposed to hurt?” Meaning this. Meaning love.

“Of course it is. We’re still human. Pain is everywhere in life. You just have to stay strong through it. And you will never need to do it alone. Not anymore.”

His friend, partner, lover sighed deeply, moving his chin up, taking in the kiss that Yusuf offered when he had done it. After they broke apart, he sighed again. “I think we need to go down to the ocean and wash off.”

Yusuf burst out laughing. “That is a very good idea, _hayati_. I’ll race you to the water.”


	9. Day Three Hundred and Forty-one

☽

Encumbered by the bundle in his arms, Nicolò let Yusuf push the handle and open the door for him. He offered him a nod in thanks, hefting the heavy weight, and stepped through into their room.

There was a shout of alarm, and he flinched, unsure of the danger, before his legs were swept out from under him. He careened backwards, striking his shoulder on the doorframe as he fell. The crate in his arms came with him, its heft toppling his center, and when he landed flat on his back, the crate crushed against his ribs, expelling a wheezing breath and exploding in the momentary pain of broken bone.

Yusuf stepped over his body, going for whatever was inside the room – Nicolò still hadn’t even seen it from behind his load – but they were unarmed, arriving home from their latest hauling job. Complacent, they had become, and as Nicolò pushed the crate unhappily off his sunken chest, hearing the shattered rattle of the cookware inside, he was rewarded only with a strong set of hands taking on fistfuls of his shirt to haul him back to his feet.

Yusuf had been grappled in the center of their room, his arms held behind him and his body torqued at a strange diagonal, one knee supporting him as he rested, subdued. The woman holding him smiled mildly over at Nicolò and his own captor, something powerful behind her expression and carriage, a resting danger that could be unsheathed at any moment.

“Oh, you were right,” sighed the second woman in Greek, the one holding him, gazing at him with the brightness of a flame. “He does have beautiful eyes.”

“Let go of him,” Yusuf choked, struggling momentarily.

“Peace, little brother,” said the first woman. “If I let go, will you relax?”

“Let go of me and find out.”

“Yusuf,” Nicolò said. He had already healed back to full strength and was not fighting. The woman holding him had relaxed her grip, now only one obligatory hand placed gently on his bicep, as if she was a friend attaching herself to him in a crowd.

Yusuf glared at him from his awkward angle. He could not see the face of the woman holding him, and perhaps he hadn’t looked too closely at the one beside Nicolò, but Nicolò had, and his astonishment was making him stupid, like a rabbit that didn’t know it was already trapped.

“Who are you?” Nicolò asked the woman, staying in the Greek the other two wielded as if the language had been made for them. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re friends. If we let go, can we have a civil conversation?”

“That depends if conversation is all you’re intending.”

The woman grinned, showing off very white teeth and a sparkle of friendliness he was not expecting. She didn’t fear him any more than she could fear a moth, and yet her humoring of him was not meant in insult or condescension. “For now, yes,” she said, slowly letting Yusuf out of the grapple, a warning that she could easily get him back into it and more. “What we need is a conversation.”

Yusuf recovered, rolling his shoulder away from the straining angle it had been held at, his chin low, his gaze like a wolf’s. He had seen their faces now, but his recognition had not run into amazement, or wonder. He knew who these women were just as Nicolò did, but their strangeness and danger were not welcome.

The taller woman held her hand out to Nicolò, having already assessed Yusuf’s disapproval and suspicion. She would parley with the one who was more open to it first, easing herself into the role of negotiator, earning the second’s trust with the first’s rapport. In moments, she had evaluated this, summing up their relationship, following the path of her decisions to the end result. Nicolò took her hand, dazed at her power, her wisdom.

“My name is Andromache. She is Quỳnh. We’ve been searching for you two for almost a year now.”

“How? Why?”

“As to the how, we’ve been following the few clues we can glean from your appearances in our dreams. Yes,” she said, nodding at his surprise. “The dreams go both ways. It was just that we knew enough to follow them. As to why, that is harder. It’s a… compulsion, I guess.”

“We have to come together,” said the second woman, Quỳnh. She had a feral wildness to her eyes, the fox to Yusuf’s wolf, but her smile was genuine, youthful. “It means something that the dreams stop when we do.”

“Our dreams of you will stop?”

“Yes, and ours of you. Now that we’ve met.” Andromache cocked her head, her hands resting calmly on arms folded in front of her belly, and made careful, lasting eye contact with each of them in turn. “What are your names? Of everything we learned, we have never gotten those.”

“Don’t tell her,” Yusuf breathed softly in Zeneize.

“I understand you don’t trust us yet,” Andromache replied smoothly in the Tuscan dialect, her eyes on Nicolò, who had twitched in surprise. Her accent was astounding, and the shared history and cadence between the two dialects was enough for him. She continued effortlessly into Arabic. “But our abilities have made us kin.”

“Our?” Nicolò spoke softly.

“Yes.” She beheld him, her eyes hot like coals. “We’re the same. Immortal.”

“Prove it.”

They looked at Yusuf, who had his scimitar in his hand, slipped from its place just below the frame of the bed.

Andromache held her hand out without argument, without even changing the expression on her face. Yusuf glanced momentarily at Nicolò before returning his attention to her, not sparing her any suspicion, as if she would take his momentary lack of attention as the chance to attack. His wrist turned, extending the sword, and she grasped the blade with the full flat of her hand in a scorpion’s strike, faster than anyone should be able to move. Yusuf flinched, jerking the weapon away, but she had already sliced her palm down to the bone.

She lifted her hand, her fingers flexing, the tendons moving wetly inside the cut as blood dripped in a curtain down her wrist. And it healed before their eyes, the skin whispering closed. She wiped the remaining blood away with her other hand before taking the rag Quỳnh was holding out for her, taken from their table as she crossed the room between them.

“We weren’t expecting two,” Quỳnh said conversationally. “That hasn’t happened before.”

“We died together,” Nicolò said.

“We saw,” she said, keen. “It was confusing that first time, trying to figure out which of you was the abdomen and which was the throat.”

Nicolò and Yusuf shared a glance, a long look that had an entire conversation behind it.

“It’s lucky that you two had each other,” Andromache said, nodding to accentuate her words. “You probably talked through it enough to relieve a lot of the fear.”

“Eventually,” Yusuf gave, almost smiling.

“We had to learn the other’s language first,” said Nicolò. “And we had to learn… to trust.”

“Lucky,” she repeated softly. “What are your names?”

“Nicolò di Genova,” he said, after looking for and receiving the tiniest of nods from Yusuf, their eyes meeting again. “He is Yusuf al-Kaysani.”

“You were in Jerusalem for the sack,” Quỳnh said, speaking to both of them, leaning casually against their table with her arms held straight at her sides, her legs extended and crossed.

“We were,” Yusuf said, defensive again. “But we left and came here.”

“First to Constantinople,” Andromache corrected serenely. “We saw the ships, and the landslide.” Her pale eyes, nearly the same color as Nicolò’s, flickered back to him. “We felt that one deeply. Quỳnh woke screaming. That’s a death I’ve never had before.”

Nicolò moved his head gruffly, not wishing to relive any of that experience. He wouldn’t easily forget the feeling of sand forcing itself down his throat as he died and revived and died again, screaming all the while.

“We tried to make it to you in Constantinople, after we had to double back through Judea a few months on from the sack. We did stop to help sort some of it with the survivors, but we were afraid of missing you. Which we did, in the end.” Andromache rolled her eyes over at Quỳnh, who gave nothing away except a tiny quirk of one eyebrow.

“I would do it again,” she said.

“And I, happily beside you, _c_ _ư_ _ng._ ”

“We stayed in Constantinople, waiting for the next clue,” Quỳnh continued, picking up the thread of their storytelling. “It took a long time for us to see Athens, because so much of it was just the ocean. You two must really love the Mediterranean.”

“You’ve been here too long,” Andromache said, less forgiving, as if their difficulty in tracking down the two men was their fault.

“We’ve been here for eight months,” Yusuf replied testily, using the Christian calendar with practiced ease.

“Seven months too long. Our abilities make us conspicuous. You don’t want to attract too much attention.”

“We’ve been careful.”

“I’m sure you have,” she said, allowing them this, even agreeing slightly, with a turn of her head around their room. “But I think you’ll agree it’s time to move on with us.”

Nicolò felt a stab of dismay. He didn’t want to leave Athens. The city had been the place where he and Yusuf had fallen in love, first kissed. It was the city where they had shared body and soul, and they had made a home here. Yes, perhaps they wouldn’t have been able to make it truly into a place for their lifetimes, but surely, for just a few more months, until they felt ready…

“So that’s it, then?” Yusuf said, placing his hands on his hips. “You break into our home and decide you’re in charge of us and our choices.”

“Not at all,” Andromache said. “I was hoping you’d come to that conclusion yourself.”

Quỳnh grinned from her spot at the table. “Don’t mind her,” she said. “She’s used to being in charge, but she isn’t always right.”

“About this, I am.”

“Yes, but you have to ease them into it, my love.”

Yusuf glanced between the women, remembering the tenderness they’d sometimes seen between them in their dreams, wondering if they had seen the same in theirs.

“There’s more to know,” Andromache said softly. “If you’re willing to listen.”

Nicolò nodded, anxiety prickling cold along the skin of his arms. Something behind her eyes had turned sad, almost sorrowful, and he desperately wished they hadn’t come today. It would be different from this moment onward; his and Yusuf’s year of careful, evolving joy and partnership was over. He remembered her word, kin, and knew it to be true, even if there wasn’t trust yet. Just like with Yusuf, there would be time to gain it.

Andromache paused, taking a careful, regal seat on the edge of their bed. “I am old,” she began, and Yusuf moved across the room to stand beside him, one hand taking hold so that they could be tied together for this fall.

The three others stayed quiet as Andromache explained the rules, the knowledge, the price. Some of it, like the healing, the danger of what they had, the two men already knew. Some of it – the length, the grief – they had not considered, or dwelled upon, and the information stung but would mend. The last of it – Lykon, his name had been, and he had been powerful and loved and lost – was a mortal wound, and Andromache let them go when she was done.

“I know it doesn’t make any sense,” she said to their backs as they were turning to leave, heading for a quiet moment alone for what would probably be the last time for a while. “And I know it’s not what you would ever want for yourselves. But since you have it, you might as well make the best of it. Especially since you’re not alone. Never take that for granted.”

Nicolò would never forget this moment, in a thousand years to come.

☉

Yusuf took several steps down the sea stairs, his boots slipping on the salt-slick shells embedded in the stones, and took to the sand in a loping half-run, as if he could escape. His hand, still tied within Nico’s, squeezed and pleaded, and as they made it to the dry strip of sand just before the waves’ edge, he turned and fell into an embrace, not sure which of them was holding the other upright.

“It won’t happen,” Nico whispered. “It’s different for us.”

“It’s not,” Yusuf said, his eyes screwed up, his face tucked into Nicolò’s shoulder and neck. He could feel the muggy heat of tears growing in the space between his skin and Nico’s, but he was fighting it.

“It is. We can’t let this take over. If we spend every day for the next thousand years worrying about it, we’ll never get another chance to live.”

“I love you. I never should have said that nothing can hurt us.”

“But you were right.”

“What about Lykon?” Yusuf pulled away, his face dry, but for a moment Nico didn’t let him. Now they were only separated a few inches, their arms still holding, their faces desperate and grief-stricken and close. “What about Andromache and Quỳnh’s love for him? They couldn’t do a thing to save him when he lost the immortality.”

“But maybe…” Nico looked off into the distance of the sea. “Maybe we will lose it at the same time, since we gained it at the same time. Maybe we have do it all together.”

Yusuf’s heart beat, a small flutter of hope like a bird beating against a cage that was slowly breaking down. He wasn’t sure if he believed it, but maybe it was so. Maybe that was what he needed to continue on.

“What do you think of them?” he asked, after a long pause of letting the waves sigh beside them. Quỳnh was right; they did love the Mediterranean. Nicolò in Genova, him in Tunis, and then later, in Constantinople and Athens: they were tied to the sea, born in it, sheltered by it.

“I think she is going to be a good leader. I think you will have to check your temper.”

“I don’t have a temper.”

“Santa Maria.”

Yusuf chuckled weakly. “I’m not sure how much I like the idea of being forced to move about at the whim of someone else.”

“Nor I. Maybe we’ll get a say in it when she learns better who we are.” Nicolò rubbed his thumbs soothingly against Yusuf’s back where he was holding him. “Did you hear what she said about staying in Jerusalem to ‘help sort some of it’?”

“Yes. We’ll have to ask what that meant.”

“If it meant what I thought it did, I could be happy to stand alongside them, if that’s how they spend their centuries. It’s what we did with Esen. We could do that more, and better.”

Yusuf did not reply, his head full of too many possibilities. He felt, foolishly, like running. If the women hadn’t lied about the dreams stopping, they could be out of the city in an hour, boarding a ship to any port in the known world, and they would have no further way of tracking them. But maybe that wasn’t how it was meant to be. Maybe Andromache and Quỳnh were right; maybe, because they shared the immortality, they were meant to share their experiences of it. Maybe not in the same way as Nicolò and Yusuf, but together, as two pairs, as two sets of partners.

Nicolò saw his restlessness. He moved his head forward, taking a kiss Yusuf gave without hesitation, still clinging to him. When they came apart, they moved as one, settling down side-by-side on their rears, leaning heads and shoulders in, knees drawn up to rest their knotted arms. Their fingers intertwined. As always, they faced the sea.

“They’re in love,” Yusuf said.

“Like us. For far longer than us.”

“And they manage to do it with the same knowledge.”

“With more. They had to watch him die.”

Yusuf was talking himself into it, and kind, sweet Nicolò was obliging, trailing along the same path, following and leading all at once. Taking turns, as they always had. It hadn’t been something they’d ever articulated tangibly, but they both knew how to ebb and flow through their emotions, their moods, their fears and triumphs, and they did it like breathing, like the tides of the sea. Unpracticed, unfettered, something natural between the two of them, they were two halves of a whole, and it hadn’t even been a year. Think of what they could do, who they would be, in five, ten, a thousand.

A swell of impossible love rose in Yusuf’s chest, and he turned his face, kissing deeply, his fingers perched below Nico’s chin like the graceful pose of a statue. Then he rested his forehead against his, eyes closed.

“I love you,” Nico breathed. He said it less, a man of fewer words, but he meant it all the same, in all the same ways. How had Yusuf managed to live so long without his other half? It felt like he’d been asleep without knowing it for thirty-three years, and only now was he opening his eyes, seeing the world, tasting the salt and yeast of life on his tongue.

“What should we do?” he asked, though he knew the answer. He just wanted Nico’s voice, given in offering to him, only him, for one last time.

“We go back. We learn. We fight, if that’s what Andromache asks. We help, if we find a way to.”

Yusuf sighed, nodding, opening his eyes, seeing the sea out beyond them, leading to cities, ports, experiences, all of which they would get to see. Together. He stood, unwrapping himself from the warmth of Nico’s embrace, holding his hands out to bring him up beside him. They hugged, Yusuf sparing one last moment to trail his hand down to Nico’s ass for a squeeze that made him buck and laugh into his ear. He grinned back, taking in as much as he could with his eyes, ears, hands, before letting Nico turn away and lead him up the stairs with the shells, their hands clasped.


End file.
